Arriving into Inverness at just gone half past eight onboard the Highland Sleeper, we had a good few hours until we could check into our hotel and so decided to repeat my explorations from my last visit to Inverness and jump onboard the next ScotRail service west along one of the UK’s most beautiful railways, to Kyle of Lochalsh.
The last time I travelled onboard the Caledonian Sleeper was in October 2020 in that weird period between lockdowns when the Government were encouraging people to do things but restrictions were still in place and it all felt a bit… well, weird… This journey I was travelling on the same route as my maiden sleeper voyage, from London Euston to the capital of the Highlands, Inverness.
ight services via Sheffield and one that avoids the Steel City and now carries only freight via the north-east Derbyshire village of Barrow Hill. That village is also home to a piece of Britain’s railway history, Barrow Hill Roundhouse, the last surviving railway roundhouse in the United Kingdom with an operational turntable.
Earlier in November I headed up to Darlington on an LNER service with the intention on nipping up the Bishop Auckland branch and visiting the National Railway Museum’s second site, Locomotion at Shildon. Unfortunately, what I didn’t take into account was forgetting to check the opening hours, finding out on arrival that Locomotion is closed on Monday and Tuesdays. My trip was on a Tuesday…
With a winter chill in the air, but a glorious sunrise just beginning, I arrived at Peterborough station bright and early ready for another adventure. My ultimate destination was the NRM’s Locomotion in Shildon (although that failed miserably), however the first leg, as far as Darlington, was with LNER in first-class. It also turns out that this is the 150th blog of Flights and Times and so I feel that a first-class journey was appropriate.
iving into the grand Victorian station onboard a Great Anglia class 755, my first impressions of Bury St Edmunds were of a once important town that has found itself of diminishing importance in recent years. The station building was much too grand for its three services every two hours between Ipswich, Cambridge and Peterborough and the large gap between the east and westbound lines hinted at through lines once being present.
