An Interesting Exhibition ... and an Interesting Way Home

Rail Excursion to a Unique Exhibition

We travelled to London a couple of weekends ago on "grandparent duty," looking after two of our granddaughters while their parents went away for a night. It was unfortunate that it was a weekend when Kings Cross station was closed for some of the upgrade work on the East Coast Main Line, so we had to find a different way home - getting there on Friday was normal, but returning on Saturday evening was another matter. Although we did not need to be there on Friday before the end of school, we took the opportunity to visit the Tutankhamun exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery while we were in London, so we set off during the morning with the 09:00 to Peterborough, where we had time for our complimentary hot chocolate at the Great Northen Hotel coffee lounge before taking a LNER train to Kings Cross, on which we enjoyed our coffee and biscuits before arrival in London.

Before going on to Chelsea for the exhibition, I had one little task at Kings Cross, which was to connect my new Senior Railcard with my Oyster Card, so that my discount would apply to my travel in London (for the three year's of the railcard's validity) as well as my travel to and from London. It took a few moments to find a free member of staff to do that for me, and then we were on our way to Sloane Square. There we had our lunch in the top-floor restaurant at Peter Jones department store and then walked to the Saatchi Gallery, about four minutes away along the Kings Road. We had timed tickets and arrived well within the half-hour "window" of our ticket time and had to queue (in the rain!) for the security check. Security was tight, for this exhibition was of some of the striking artefacts from within the tomb of King Tutankhamun, being shown for the last time outside Egypt where a new museum is being built to hold them in perpetuity. The gallery was very firm about limiting what we could take in and we had to have minimal weekend luggage in what I think of as handbags (including gifts for the children!), but it did mean that we were pretty swift in getting about! Just as well, not only did it take us a while to get into the exhibition, but there was a lot of it and it was fascinating. I learnt a lot about the politics of ancient Egypt and about the twentieth-century search for the tomb. The exhibition is well worth seeing, whether your interest is in art, ancient religion, history, geography, or just seeing something amazing that you may never see again!

Leaving the exhibition we made our way to Hammersmith, met one granddaughter from school and one from nursery and spent the evening and next day with them, hampered by weather from time to time but very happy to have the chance to spend time with these two, whom we cannot get to see all that often.

Saturday evening came and with it our son and his wife and relief from our duties, and we set off for home, a journey that would be taking an hour or so longer than usual: an adventure on a line we had never used before!

We began with the usual Hammersmith & City Underground train to Kings Cross St Pancras but this time instead of turning right for Kings Cross main line station we turned left for St Pancras. We had First Class Advance tickets for a Nottingham train and were travelling as far as Leicester where we were to change trains for the last connection to Stamford. We arrived in good time because we have to allow time for delays on the Underground but there were none and we had time on our hands - fine, we thought, we'll go the the First Class lounge as we normally do at Kings Cross, but we discovered that East Midlands Railway does not open its lounge at weekends like LNER does next door. We were already beginning to get an idea of how much less we were likely to get for our money on this route ... and we went to look around the shops. I had looked in advance at what the included catering would be and so we bought some salads from M&S at St Pancras to ensure that we would have something for supper, and then we saw that our train was boarding and made our way to the platform.

Since the big rebuild of St Pancras station, only the international trains now use the original, famous train shed; South Eastern and East Midlands trains only penetrate as far as the half-way point where the main entrance now is, under the new flat-roof extension, and East Midlands Railway seems to marshall its trains with the First Class accommodation at the north end of the train, so having walked a long way to the platform we now set off to the far end of the platform for our coach. We did wonder whether there might be crowds using these trains with the adjacent main line being closed for the weekend, but it was OK. In the coach with our reserved seats there was a little spare space, but the next coach was almost empty and so we decided to sit there instead and as soon as we were under way I went to the buffet counter to collect our refreshments, having found out from the website that at weekends there is no trolley service but we could show our tickets at the counter for our included refreshments, which turned out to be tea or coffee and biscuits, and a bottle of water, served with a smile by a very friendly bar host. The train itself was comfortable, smooth and swift, a classic British Rail High Speed Train.

The use of a different route home would have been really interesting in the summer when we could watch a different slice of the world sliding past our window, but now, in the winter darkness, there was nothing to see! Even the station names could not be read at the speed we were travelling (not up to East Coast Main Line speeds, but still pretty fast) and we only stopped once before Leicester so progress was hard to gauge, too. Soon enough we arrived on time at Leicester where we waited half an hour for our connection to Stamford for our home. Amusingly there were announcements about trains to and from London being busier than usual because of the closure of Kings Cross, but, of course, so would trains towards Peterborough be busier, but no-one mentioned that! And Leeds, and York, and Doncaster .... Our train came, we boarded it (Standard Class this time) and went home to Stamford. An unremarkable, and not too crowded, journey with Cross Country Trains and we were soon taking our familiar walk homewards across The Meadows at Stamford, with the steeple of All Saints' Church floodlit before us and welcoming us home.

Across the Mersey

Ferry Across the Mersey, approaching "The Three Graces" of
the instantly-recognisable Liverpool waterfront

Under the River by Train

Liverpool, one of Britain's greatest cities and at one time second only to London, has always been on my list of destinations for an adventure. I have been there a handful of times but never explored it properly, and recently I found myself there once again for a brief visit (by car, for several reasons, so not recorded in this blog) and while there started compiling a list of things which will have to be on the itinerary when we go there properly. And I did manage to get in one very short little adventure by train by myself, and the story of that can be told here!

I first visited Liverpool as part of a field course when I was studying Town Planning in the mid 1970s. At that time there had been several dock closures and the city was fairly depressed but still reasonably vibrant. We did tour the dock and saw much activity still going on, and in some free time I visited the historic waterfront and there were crowds boarding the Mersey ferries to cross to Birkenhead, the ferries then still playing a major rôle in the conurbation's public transport. Like the riversides of London and Newcastle, Liverpool's has changed much and yet in some ways has changed little. The "Three Graces", its distictive, instantly-recognisable waterfront office buildings, are still there, opposite the passenger ferry quay, and the ferries still operate, although now more for fun than necessity because, under construction when I visited in the seventies, the underground railway system now takes most of the cross-river passenger traffic, much quicker and more efficient but less exciting.

For my little adventure, I went across to Birkenhead by train, largely to visit the waterfront on the Wirral side; I had only ever been on the Liverpool side so far. I was aware from reading notices on my seventies visit that the improvements to the local railway system were basically a loop around the city centre and a link across it, joining up some suburban routes directly with connections to others, and that there was a selection of city centre stations at which I could board a train which would take me under the Mersey to Birkenhead. I had also heard that Birkenhead Hamilton Square station was interesting architecturally, and on the map it seemed to be the one that is served by every train across the river, so that made it my destination station for the adventure.

Birkenhead Hamilton Square station, with
ventilation tower for the tunnel

The underground line that crosses the Mersey loops around Liverpool city centre, calling at James Street in both directions and going one way via Moorfields, Lime Street and Central, each of which connects to other lines. I left my wife (only for a couple of hours!) at a museum near Lime Street and caught my train from there. The underground platform has a very similar ambience to London’s Underground stations and the trains are about as frequent, although much shorter, and I was soon on my way. Making my way to the surface by lift at Hamilton Square I emerged just a few moments later into quite a different world, much quieter.

I ambled down to the riverbank towards the Birkenhead Woodside ferry terminal (I have no idea why it is called Woodside: there is no trace of a wood, but plenty of water) and there happened to be a ferry about to depart, so I took a few photographs (one of which heads this blog post) as it cast off and crossed to the Liverpool side. Then I ordered coffee and cake and sat in the café at the Woodside terminal leafing through tourist brochures I had picked up there and decided that when we do the full Merseyside adventure it is going to have to be several days long in order to pack everything in, including the Manchester Ship Canal cruise and a heritage tram ride to the Wirral Transport Museum, whose vintage tram service has a terminal right by the Woodside ferry terminal, and that, too, must be on a future itinerary. Before catching the train back to Liverpool I took a short stroll in the direction of the museum and found it well within walking distance of Hamilton Square. A last look across the Mersey to the Liverpool skyline and it was time to head back to the city as my free time drew to an end. Every train in the Liverpool direction calls at all the stations on the city centre loop, and this time I travelled as far as Liverpool Central, handiest for the rendezvous with my wife. We enthused together about a future trip and agreed that we should indeed need several days to enjoy all that there would be to do.

Making an Exhibition!

The Market Deeping Model Railway Club of which I am a member often exhibits a layout at exhibitions around the East Midlands and beyond, and I volunteered to help operate its "Canons Cross" 00 gauge layout at the Festival of British Railway Modelling this month at Doncaster Racecourse. The way it worked was that four members drove to the venue on Friday with the layout packed in two cars and stayed over the exhibition weekend in a local hotel, then two more members travelled to join them on each of the two open days of the exhibition. I opted to attend on the Saturday and booked train tickets with LNER from Peterborough to Doncaster (just £5.75 each way, Advance Standard Class with my Senior Railcard) and with Cross Country from my local station to Peterborough and back.

Some dreadful weather, Storm Ciara, was threatened for the Sunday but Saturday was expected to be OK (although a cold start), and I set off from home for the 07:19 East Midlands Railway train bound for Norwich which I left at Peterborough to meet another club member to travel together on the 07:53 Leeds train as far as Doncaster. We'd had a rather scary email message a couple of days earlier from LNER saying that our booked service would be operated by a 5-coach Azuma train instead of the planned 9-coach InterCity 225 so there would be no seat reservations and it may even be that we may not be able to board at all so our tickets would be valid on the following train (just 5 minutes later, but stopping several times whereas our planned train was non-stop between Peterborough and Doncaster). In the event our little train came in from London with a couple of dozen passengers on board and just another couple of dozen waiting at Peterborough, so we found ourselves sharing a coach with about two other people! As we boarded the buffet counter was right in front of us so we bought coffee and and pastries for breakfast and took our seats, talking club business, as you do, all the way to Doncaster. I had heard many comments about the hard seats in Standard Class on these trains but I was very happy with mine and would recommend them wholeheartedly. Even in Standard I was able to keep my smartphone charged with a socket by my seat and had plenty of space to myself.

The express arrives at platform 2 at
Canons Cross, Southern Region BR

At Doncaster we walked round the corner to the bus station and asked about buses to the racecourse. While there are many service buses that would take us close to the venue, there was a service numbered 101 which was direct to the racecourse for the event and which was about to leave, so we hopped on board and were taken, the only two passengers, straight to the front door. Visitors were already queuing for the opening, still half-an-hour away, but we went straight in and explained that we were exhibitors and needed to have our passes, which our colleagues who'd arrived the previous day had ready for us. and so began a thoroughly enjoyable day of operating model trains and chatting to visitors at one of the nation's larger model railway shows. I had never operated this particular layout before and was given plenty of instruction by my more-experienced colleagues and had a really great time. When you realise what an effort it is to remove a steam locomotive from an arriving train, take to be turned, coaled and watered and then returning it to its train, compared with driving an electric multiple unit in and then just driving it out again you soon see why the full-size railway has done away with steam traction!

We had many visitors watching us and as the day wore on the numbers thinned dramatically just before closing time and this was a good opportunity to have a look at other layouts and the trade stands before it was time to head back to the station for the train home. Having an Advance ticket meant that I had to await my booked train (you have to sacrifice something to get such a cheap ticket!) so I saw two other trains to Peterborough leave before my own ... a good reason to have a pint of real ale from the neat little Draughtsman Alehouse on platform 3, sitting outside and watching the trains go by. There were many services I expected to see, to Leeds, Sheffield, the north, north Lincolnshire and south Yorkshire, but some surprises, too. One train, from York, was going to London St Pancras International, which I had not expected to see: it was an East Midlands Railway service via Sheffield and Derby and although not a quick way to London provided some useful journey possibilities on the way; another was to Southampton Central - not a destination I expected to see at Doncaster: it just goes to show how far you can get with no or just one change of train.

I used the Seatfrog app for the first time. This allows ticket-holders to bid in auction for First Class upgrades to their Standard Class tickets, and I won an upgrade for just £10. Given that the train was again lightly-loaded I am not sure I needed First Class, really, but I did once more share a coach with just a handful of other people and had very personal attention from the First Class host. This was one of the trains that stop at all the intermediate stops but never less I was soon in Peterborough where there was just a short wait for my Cross Country train to Stamford.

It had been a brilliant day in the company of some good friends and lots of appreciative strangers and I had had some great train rides as well.

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