Some Practical Little Journeys

Train trips to events official and personal

Sometimes I travel for fun, sometimes because I have to be in other places to do things of varying importance. Either way I always try to travel by train or bus whenever I can (or walk or cycle for short journeys), for all sorts of reasons I have been through elsewhere in this blog. 

Recently I have taken a trip to Lincoln for an event at the Cathedral where our Acting Bishop wanted to thank those of us who continue to provide ministry in our retirement. The value of retirement ministry was illustrated when I arranged a meeting in Lincoln on the same day, planning to go straight from the meeting to the cathedral service, which was followed by a sandwich lunch (I walked in to the service just as the Bishop was starting it!). Fitting in the meeting before an 11:00 event meant that I had to leave Stamford much earlier than usual. It was tempting to drive, but I had so much I wanted to get done and driving the car seems such a waste of time even though theoretically it would get me to Lincoln nearer to the time of my meeting and in less time, and would enable me to leave whenever I wished. The ability to get things done won out, though, and I booked train tickets to leave Stamford on the 06:57 after a hurried breakfast.

This gave me a simple connection into the 07:31 East Midlands Railway service to Lincoln via Spalding and Sleaford. I said Morning Prayer on the train to Peterborough and then worked the rest of the way, partly on preparation for my meeting and then making my way through a rather full email inbox - retirement has not stood in the way of busyness! I arrived in Lincoln in plenty of time before my meeting and had a cup of coffee at the Grand Café at the bus station before taking a bus up the hill to my meeting.

I had a good time catching up with old friends and making new ones over the lunch after the cathedral worship and then it was time to walk back down to the station. I had booked Anytime tickets and had seats reserved on a 15:27 departure, but was ready to leave well before then. There was a LNER Azuma standing at the station bound for London with a stop at Peterborough, so I boarded that and was taken smoothly and swiftly back to Peterborough, this time via Newark and Grantham. The reason this train was not shown as an option for travel to Stamford is that it would have connected with the one westbound train per day which Cross Country is presently not running between Peterborough and Stamford: a "Covid Keep" I'd rather lose! There is now a much better service than ever between Peterborough and Lincoln, but it is of limited value to Stamford people because of the gaps in the timetable, one each way, on our local line. Anyway, it worked for me because I knew there was a bus that I could use to fill the gap, and being old enough for free bus travel it did not cost me anything - but it did not leave until just before the train, if running, would have arrived in Stamford, and it was very much slower than the train. Still, it worked and I was still home in reasonable time and had had a good day's work and play.

The other recent short trip was to Nottingham with my wife to attend the funeral of an old acquaintance. Again it was tempting to take the car but in the end we decided to travel by rail which would allow flexibility to have drinks with friends afterwards if appropriate and to travel together for part of the way back with those from farther away whom we knew to be travelling by rail. Getting there turned out to be much quicker than anticipated: our train to Leicester was on time, but the services from there to Nottingham were running just a touch late, two or three minutes, which made it just possible, if we hurried, to get a connection half and hour earlier than planned, and it was also a quicker train, non-stop to Nottingham. We had planned plenty of time in Nottingham for coffee and a tram to the church for the funeral, but after the coffee we actually had time to walk to the church, and even to take a detour through the arboretum which was rather pleasant, and still be in plenty of time. We met one friend there, and another couple arrived a little later on a train from London.

Afterwards, when memories had been exchanged over food and drink we made our way back. This time we joined our three friends on the tram which took us straight to Nottingham rail station. One was taking a Cardiff train from there, and the rest of us boarded the next train for London which was calling at Leicester. There we left our London friends and awaited the train home. There was almost an hour to wait, so we left the station and enjoyed a cocktail (buy one, get one free!) at The Merchant of Venice, the Shakespeare-themed Italian café-restaurant almost opposite the station, which is rapidly becoming our usual stopping place in Leicester. Trains between Leicester and Stamford are not especially quick, the route being a "pasting together" of what remains of several former branch lines, but it is a useful line and they are fast enough for our purposes. Again, they suffer from the gaps in service that I mentioned above, but for us these do not matter on this part of the route because we never travel out in the afternoon or home in the morning: it is when we are going out towards Peterborough or Cambridge and returning in the afternoon that the gaps are an inconvenience. Perhaps when the strikes are over and people have the confidence to travel again (and Cross Country employs enough drivers!) the full timetable will operate once more and we'll be able to travel when and where we like.

Lincoln: A New Start for Me

Azuma at Peterborough, where we changed for
Stamford on our way home

A Day Out by Train with Friends

I have not been to Lincoln for a couple of years, whereas before Covid and retirement I used to visit about monthly. In those days there were few trains and I had to drive as often as not, and the rail journey was often longer and more complex than a short trip to ones own county town ought to be. During the lockdowns and "stay at home" advice of the last couple of years some significant improvements to the rail services have taken place and there has also much much work done to the city centre at Lincoln, and to Lincoln Cathedral, too. When some friends were staying and we were looking for somewhere for a day out together Lincoln came to mind: it is a place where I had lived many years ago, and before that a place where I and one of the friends had spent a few days when we had not known each other for long, so there were some memories to be stirred. Tickets were booked using the LNER app, choosing trains that would take us out by one route and back by another and would give us plenty of time in Lincoln while allowing us back to Stamford in time for a restaurant dinner. All of us having Senior Railcards the total fare was just under £100 for Anytime Day Returns, although where possible we did have seats booked on our chosen trains. Had we become bored or the weather become rough we could return early (but not late if we wanted our booked dinner!).

(This was to be an easy-going, relaxed day out, so I did not take my camera with me and any illustrations you see here are from my earlier collection.)

We left Stamford on the 09:56 Cross Country train to Peterborough and although our reserved seats were not all adjacent (the Cross Country algorithm does seem to leave something to be desired) we did manage to find a table for 4 for this short leg of the trip. This service neatly connects with an East Midlands Railway departure from Peterborough to Lincoln, part of the improved offering from this company since I last travelled that way. Although there had long been a train at about this time, it had always been a short, single-coach train which might be able to take everyone at Peterborough but was always grossly overcrowded when it reached Lincoln. The service also used to start late in the morning and finish early in the afternoon, of little use to most potential passengers - and although that did not affect us on this trip it was the main reason for me having to use my car in the past. We were surprised to find that our train was not just a bit longer than before, but consisted of four coaches and although there are no seat reservations on this route it was easy to choose a table together with a window to open for anti-viral ventilation as well as a view of the countryside. We were blessed with gorgeous weather for the time of the year, late October, with lots of sunshine and no rain (although the forecast until that very morning had not been so optimistic).

The first part of the ride to Lincoln took us up the East Coast Main Line as far as Werrington Junction, retracing the steps of the last couple of miles of the trip from Stamford, and then we set off across the Lincolnshire fens on the route through Spalding and Stamford towards Lincoln. This section is marked by distant and not-so-distant spires and towers of town and village churches among the clumps of trees that mark those places, including Deeping St James where we also once lived and Crowland, the historic Abbey of St Guthlac. Soon the train approached Spalding where two of us had grown up, but apart from the area immediately around the station all now unrecognisable, so much has the town grown. There were enormous new houses being built well out of the town centre and we wondered where on earth the people to live in them would work and shop, there being little in Spalding itself these days.

Soon we were off across the fens again to Sleaford, with a slight hold-up on the approach to the station because of the constricted access since tracks there were reduced some years previously. More people joined the train here than left it, and the four coaches were beginning to look more of a necessity than a luxury. Many more joined us at Ruskington and at Metheringham, now well out of the fens into gently rolling hills, and the train was nicely full without being crowded when we arrived on time at Lincoln. A pleasant ride through sunny Lincolnshire, and now to explore the city. It was great to be back, and I was looking forward to seeing how the city centre improvements had progressed since I was last here.

We started "uphill" around the cathedral and castle and made our way down, so the first thing to do was to visit the bus station, opposite the rail station, and take a bus up to the cathedral. These run frequently are are not too expensive and do save the effort (and time) of climbing one of the steepest streets in England!

From the Cathedral bus stop we went to look at the foundations of the Roman east gate, preserved in front of The Lincoln Hotel - fresh from a holiday in Rome it was good to be reminded that we have quite a lot of Roman remains here in England, too, even if ours are several centuries younger than some of the Italian ones! Strolling around East Bight we followed the course of the Roman city wall and saw more fragments of it in private gardens and then arrived at the north gate which is still in use by modern traffic, although somewhat reduced in grandeur, most notably by lorries not quite small enough to pass through. As we walked down Bailgate we reminisced about how things used to be: much was the same, and the pub where I used to recover from philosophy lectures had not changed much. We visited the site of St Paul's church, supposedly founded by St Paulinus in the early years of English Christianity, and then went to the Castle. No tickets were left to visit the buildings, but actually that was OK: it would leave us with plenty of time to see the rest of the city, and entry to the grounds is free so we spent a little time there and then found some lunch in one of the cafés on Steep Hill (yes, that is the name of the street!) before moving on to the Cathedral. One snag with visiting on a Monday as we did is that some bars, restaurants etc are not open for lunch on Mondays and with a table for four required we did have to queue for a few minutes, but only a few.

I know Lincoln Cathedral very well, partly from living in its precincts for nearly three years and partly from having taken part in its services from time to time over the last forty years, but my friends do not know it half so well, so it was good to show them around, and we did not need to join the guided tour ... What I had not seen before was the new visitor centre and education facility which had been built, with grant funding, on the north side of the Cathedral, partly in buildings formerly part of the cathedral school. The centre was not completely finished but had been partially opened for the half-term holiday for children's activities, and the new café was also open for our afternoon cup of tea, replacing the tiny coffee shop that had opened by the chapter house four decades ago.

When we had seen everything we wanted to see at Lincoln Cathedral we began the walk down the hill, stopping on the way to see the places that had mattered to us many years ago, and popping into the model shop to buy just a few more HO scale figures for my Swiss model railway, then doing just a little more shopping before exploring the Sincil Street area. This is now known as the Cornhill Quarter and a good deal more pleasant an area it is, although with many of the good local shops still present, and a cinema added. The Cornhill Quarter is immediately adjacent to the bus station, rail station and multi-storey car park and forms a great entrance to the city centre. There is still some work to do, but it is now much further advanced than when I last saw it and already looking great.

It was now time to make our way to the station and await our train home. Checking the departures we were not surprised to see that we needed to cross the bridge to the far platform, but as we crossed we were pleasantly surprised to see that the train, this time a LNER "Azuma" inter-city set, was already on its way from the siding to the platform and within a few moments of arriving the doors were unlocked and we were able to board, easily finding our reserved seats around a table for four. Much more spacious than the train on which we had arrived at Lincoln, this one took us back to Peterborough via Newark and the East Coast Main Line. As soon as it left Lincoln I went to the café-bar and bought a round of white wine to round of the warm, sunny day we had enjoyed together - I bought the last of the white wine, so I hope no-one else wanted any! While I was at the bar, the rest were watching the University of Lincoln slide past the window, and then were amazed to find that the Cathedral was also visible from the left side of the train, having been on the right side when we were at the station! There is quite a loop to get from the former Central station to the Newark line which was served by a separate station until a new link was constructed late last century. By the time we stopped at Newark darkness had come and we watched the scenery no longer. LNER took us smoothly to Peterborough for our Cross Country connection to Stamford, all on time and just right for dinner at the Cosy Club!

It had been a simple day out and yet a really good one: the weather was better than one dared hope
in mind-October, all our trains were clean, punctual and spacious enough, we had good company (well, mine was good: I have to hope the others felt the same!) and enjoyed all that we saw and did.