Having travelled from Prague on the Metropol Sleeper, I arrived into the stunning Budapest Nyugati station about eight in the morning. With under 48 hours in the Hungarian capital, I had limited time to explore and so the first task was to find somewhere to dump my bag.

Back in December we were heading down to Bath for a friend’s party and, deciding to make the most of the journey to the south-west, took the opportunity to enjoy a weekend in the historic City. Staying to the south of the city, we were a short drive from the party location, whilst also being on a bus route into the city centre.

visit Nairn and Elgin along the Firth of Forth coast. Unfortunately, having been met with departure boards showing cancelled, we weren’t able to head east and so, after a rapid replan, jumped onboard an ScotRail class 170 bound for Edinburgh with the plan to jump of in another of Scotland’s seven cities, Perth.

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.

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.

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.