Having arrived in the Belgian capital onboard a Eurostar service from St. Pancras, I had just 40-minutes to make my way through Midi station before my next train departed. As the main station for Brussels, Midi station is served by a number of international operators such as Thalys, DB and SNCF, however despite my journey crossing a border it was with the Belgian national operator, SNCB.
January means one thing for Flights and Times, a big trip spread over a few days that I wouldn’t get chance to do at other times. Unfortunately, owing to Covid, this didn’t happen in 2021 but last year saw me exploring Budapest, Bratislava and Prague as I started to travel again. For 2023’s trip I decided to do something a little bit different and so was born (Not Quite) All The Small Things, where I aimed to visit a number of Europe’s smaller countries, all whilst relying on the European rail and bus networks.
Having enjoyed a weekend in South Wales with friends, we were back at Swansea station to undertake the journey back to London, the reverse of our journey a couple of days earlier. This journey was supposed to be a little bit different but wasn’t (I’ll come to that in a bit) and so was very similar to the outbound journey.
A couple of weeks ago I took an impromptu trip to the West Midlands to have a ‘railday’ and try out some new trains. West Midlands Trains (WMT) began introducing the class 196 to services between Birmingham New Street and Shrewsbury back in October, and they now operate the majority of services on the route.
Back in December we took a trip to South Wales to visit some friends and attend a concert and, with little driving required whilst we were down there, decided to travel there and back by train. Whilst not as long as some journeys I’ve taken onboard IETs, these would certainly fall in the top few and so we treated ourselves to first class to complete the journey in comfort.
For episode 10 of Exploring the East Coast, it was time to head south from Peterborough once again to tick off the final six stations on the southern section of the East Coast Mainline (ECML). Not only were these the last six stations to do in the southern section, they were in fact the last six stations south of Morpeth, meaning episode 11 onwards would mean some trips based out of Newcastle.
