Following an enjoyable and relaxing few days in Glasgow and Corrour, it was time to head home and after making our way back to Glasgow and across to Edinburgh with ScotRail, the final leg of our Scottish adventure awaited. LNER were taking us back south along the East Coast Mainline (ECML) to Peterborough and, as with the trip north, we’d managed to get 1st Class upgrades with Seatfrog.

April saw us starting another trip to Scotland at Peterborough station, waiting for an LNER service to the Scottish capital, Edinburgh. I’ve reviewed the trip to and from Scotland with LNER plenty of times, so you can check out those previous posts on the blog, but this time I’d be travelling with Beth and we’d upgraded via Seatfrog rather than buying 1st class tickets upfront.

Back at the start of March, I took a trip to Bristol for the weekend to stay with some friends and explore some of the railways in the southwest of England. Travelling with GWR from London Paddington to Bristol Temple Meads and return, I decided to use this opportunity to try out the journey in both 1st and Standard class, upgrading my outbound trip via Seatfrog and seeing whether it was worth upgrading to 1st at a weekend.

When people talk about mainline railways that cross a UK city, probably the first that spring to mind are either Thameslink or the Elizabeth line in London. After that, Glasgow’s Argyle and North Clyde lines might come to mind, or the mess of railways that ‘kind of’ cross Manchester. However, the UK’s second city, Birmingham is also home to a cross city railway, simply named the ’Cross-City Line’.

The Glasgow Subway has been in operation for more than 125 years, since the first service ran on 14th December 1896, and since then there have only been two generations of rolling stock. The Subway’s first generation of rolling stock lasted more than 80 years, from 1896 through to 1977 when the Subway was closed for modernisation, and the current second generation was introduced when the line re-opened in 1980. This second generation of rolling stock isn’t going to make it to 80 years of service though as this year the third generation of rolling stock is starting to be introduced.

After just a few hours exploring the Croatian capital, Zagreb, I was back at Zagreb Glavni kolodvor (main station) ready to catch the final train of Snoozing to Split. This journey would take me across the majority of Croatia from the capital in the north to the coastal city of Split in the south. HZPP (Croatian Railways) operates just a couple of trains on this route each day, with my departure named the ‘Marjan’.