Real Train Ride to a Virtual Wedding

Our first train ride for months

Our first stay with friends for even more months

Young friends married at last

"I'm on the train"

So we have finally made it onto a train. Not the most exciting train, nor in itself the most exciting destination, but it has been good to celebrate with friends the marriage of mutual young friends, even though it was via the internet from a ceremony several miles away with just a few guests actually present, rather than the full church we would all have attended in person last spring. At least being together we could make more of it than sitting at home alone in sunny Stamford. It is also a delayed New Year celebration since our friends usually stay with us at New Year but, of course, that did not happen either.

It is important for socks to match face-covering ...

Booking this trip was a bit of a trial until I hit on using the LNER website to do it, for that site arranged all the required seat reservations, but it was not the most obvious company to use for the booking since we were travelling with Thameslink for the trunk haul from Peterborough to East Croydon, since that offers a through service (not quick, but simple, avoiding a change in London). Once the tickets were bought, everything was simple, though. Thameslink does not offer electronic ticketing, so although I bought the tickets from LNER I still had to collect paper tickets from the station before leaving - not a problem as the paper tickets are neat and easy to use, with no fiddling with a smartphone at ticket barriers or printing huge tickets at home and finding somewhere to carry them safely. I bought Standard Class tickets this time, which meant that we could have flexible arrangements (subject to the requisite seat reservations) at a good price, the return fare being only £1 more than the single.

The weather was hot and sunny and we needed minimal luggage. Even though attendance at the wedding was to be remote, we had decided to dress as for a wedding, so I packed a tie (although with a short-sleeved shirt) and took an unlined linen suit, which in order to avoid crushing it in the luggage I wore on the journey. With a Panama hat as well, I felt like an extra from a Poirot episode, but it did keep me cool and meant that I'd be properly dressed for the main event.

We were due to arrive in time for dinner on Friday evening and so left Stamford on the 15:54 train for Peterborough which, like several other trains on this route on that day, seemed to have left Birmingham eight minutes late and never managed to recover the time, but we still managed to catch our Thameslink connection to East Croydon, due to arrive at 18:14. It would have been possible to do it 30 minutes quicker within the ticket validity by taking a fast LNER train from Peterborough and changing at Stevenage into the previous Thameslink train which the LNER one would overtake on the way there - but we opted for the slower and simpler way of using one train right through. It did feel a bit slow as we stopped at all the stations as far as Stevenage, but then the train ran fast to Finsbury Park before taking the link to St Pancras International and then the Thameslink route through central London, with views of St Paul's Cathedral and the City skyscrapers from the stop at Blackfriars station, then of Southwark Cathedral and The Shard on the approach to London Bridge station. After London Bridge we ran fast straight to East Croydon where we left the train and made our way to the tram stop. For some reason the automatic ticket barrier was not happy with our tickets but the human ticket collector looked at them and let us through. 

This was our first use of the Croydon tram system for a very long time and we had to remember to touch in with our Oyster cards before boarding the tram - which was just about socially-distanced enough - and then remember whether or not it was necessary to touch out on arrival (it isn't). By now it was peak travel time on a Friday afternoon, and yet the transport system was not crowded, such has been the effect of the pandemic.

We walked the short distance to our friends from their local tram stop and over and after dinner caught up with almost a year's news before retiring (later than usual) to bed ready for the wedding the next day.

The couple had sent us all the link to the wedding and so we arranged chairs round a desk with a large desktop monitor, changed into our wedding clothes and waited for the ceremony to begin. Just like those really present in church we saw the bridegroom and best man take their places and have a last-minute chat with the priest, and the camera turned so that we could watch the bride enter. We cannot pretend that it was like being there but given that we could not be there it was a pretty good substitute - a good deal better than having nothing to do with it at all, which might well have been the case ten years ago when the internet was slower and software less well-developed. The sound quality was probably the least satisfactory issue, but still pretty good in the circumstances - desktop computers were not made for this!

We enjoyed sparkling wine and canapés after the wedding, no waiting for photographers for us! The afternoon was then spent strolling in a park a short tram-ride away. 

Sunday morning we attended church: the service was also live-streamed on YouTube, and for those who are interested I copy the video link below:

After lunch we took a tram back to East Croydon station for a train to London, slightly earlier than we needed for our connections home. The trip home was slightly more complex because there are no through Thameslink trains on Sundays, so our first train  was to London Victoria from where we caught the Victoria Line to Kings Cross St Pancras. With a little effort it was quite simple to maintain social distancing on the tram and on the train and Underground. At St Pancras we used some of the time we had gained by visiting Fortnum & Mason's branch at the station to replenish our supplies of St Pancras Blend tea which ran out a couple of months ago and cannot be bought anywhere else, even on line. 

Over at Kings Cross we had a rather more prosaic take-away tea on the balcony while we awaited the boarding of our LNER train to Peterborough. Reserved seating is compulsory at present on LNER trains to ensure social distancing, but we found ourselves sitting among a lot of other people so I do not know what went wrong with the system, but it was easier to keep a distance on the trains where we had a free choice of seats. No matter, we had a timely and smooth run back to Peterborough for our connection home to Stamford, also on time. On a baking hot day we were grateful that all our trains (apart from the Underground) were air-conditioned, and that we had minimised our luggage - although, of course, it was the predictable hot weather which had enabled us to reduce the luggage we needed!

Soon we were walking home among the people enjoying the hot weather in Stamford at the many outside bars which have sprung up during the pandemic, and then throwing open our windows to cool the house before bedtime. It had been a good way to resume our travels: short and simple, and with a visit to great friends we had not seen for ages, and the joy of a wedding, too! Now that we are back in the habit, we can travel with confidence on the trips we have booked over the next few months. It remains to be seen whether the international trips planned for the autumn and winter will happen as scheduled, but they are currently still in the diary.

Back on Track at Last!

Booking Train Trips for this Summer

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Over the last few weeks, and particularly since the May timetable update, rail services have been returning to normal in most places. It has been good to pass my local station in Stamford and see hourly trains to Stansted Airport (although not many passengers will be going that far!) instead of every two hours to Cambridge, and despite the problems with their train fleet LNER will be running almost a full timetable, too, once the reopening of Kings Cross is complete this week following a major rebuild of the track and platforms.

With the coming of the summer and the gradual easing of lockdown rules I have begun buying tickets for planned trips and have even planned an extra short trip at short notice. It is an exciting time and I cannot wait to get on a train again and write up the experience here - and it is not long to wait now. For now I thought I'd share some thoughts on the current difficulty in planning journeys and buying tickets, using a couple of examples of my recent (and, indeed, continuing) experience.

The ferry docked at Yarmouth

First, I have long had hotels booked in Yarmouth, Isle of Wight and Chichester for my annual summer break on the south coast of England, but travel was still pretty vague then and the hotels offered free cancellation so I was confident in booking them even though it was not certain I'd be able to go. Once the government's so-called "road map" to ending lockdown was published it all began to look more likely. First, LNER advertised Advance tickets covering all the summer, so I grabbed First Class singles each way between Peterborough and London, hoping that the other tickets I needed would gradually become available. Sure enough I was eventually, after many weeks, able to book from Waterloo to Yarmouth via the Lymington Ferry, and then from Chichester back to London Victoria and from Ryde to Chichester. The only outstanding tickets I have not yet been able to buy are the ones to get me from my home in Stamford to and from Peterborough! It is very frustrating, but Cross Country only seem to release tickets a couple of weeks or so before travel, and all my other arrangements hinge on them getting me to either Peterborough or Birmingham. Peterborough, though, is close enough for a taxi to be a reasonable alternative, although expensive and slow compared with the train, or in the daytime I can use the local bus, even slower but cheaper - free for a pensioner! I expect I'll get the Cross Country tickets eventually, but it is one job I have to keep in mind to do.

Second, the short-notice trip. It is just to Croydon to join friends for a wedding to which we were all invited when it was expected to be held last year; not that the wedding is in Croydon, we'll be joining it remotely from their home, such is the state of things these days. Anyway, Thameslink operate a through service from Peterborough to East Croydon so I went to their website to book the tickets and was put off considerably by their warnings that I would need to "reserve space" on the Cross Country trains to and from Peterborough and also reserve seats on the LNER train I'd have to use coming back because the through service does not run on Sundays. There was no clue there about how to do these things. Asking questions of the three companies' social media teams on Twitter came up with all sorts of friendly reassurances (apart from Thameslink who only asked me what date I was planning to travel, something I was not prepared to tell the world on Twitter) but no real information about exactly what to do to ensure that the tickets I bought (which were to be Super Off Peak Returns or something similar - a great bargain) would be useable at the times I needed to travel).

Eventually I took the plunge and, knowing I'd have to use one of their trains to get back, booked the tickets via the LNER website. Bingo! It was simplicity itself ... LNER came up with exactly the same routes and times and the same tickets at the same price, but crucially they also booked the reserved seats on their own train and on the Cross Country trains in both directions. Easy: paid up, job done! How I wish I had started with their website in the first place, but I did not know they'd be involved until I starting looking, and neither did I get that Thameslink's site would be so unhelpful. The moral is that I shall use LNER as my default for ticket purchases in future, no matter with which company I am travelling unless I need to use another site for a particular reason. It was all so simple, and I recommend it to anyone who needs to book a complex route with reserved seats. It is unsure yet whether compulsory reservations will be a feature of post-pandemic life, but even if not, they will be with us for a while yet, I would think.

So, with a file full of tickets and itineraries I am ready for about four or five trips over the next few weeks and months, and who knows what else may become feasible as time unfolds?

Afternoon Teas I Have Enjoyed ...

Tea by train!

(On board the Statesman train)

Afternoon tea has become trendy in recent years and is marketed as an English (or British, I am not sure which) tradition. While a cup of tea and perhaps a piece of cake or a couple of biscuits has indeed been a tradition for as long as I can remember, with the "cream tea" an occasional special treat, I am fairly sure that the concept of the afternoon tea has developed and spread relatively recently.

At the very least an afternoon tea should include tea (well ... there are some who take coffee or even a cold drink) and scones or cake, but the better teas include small sandwiches, scones with clotted cream and jam, and cake. Some include sausage rolls or some other such savoury treat along with the sandwiches. These are often served on a three-decker plate, although this is not essential and the courses may be brought separately, or on several plates. Sometimes sparkling wine is an optional extra, or even gin (but the only time I ever tried to arrange a G & tea the firm offering it went bust and we did not get it).

I list below the afternoon teas that have made it into this weblog, that is those we have taken during a rail adventure: indeed the first on the list, the North Yorkshire Pullman, was the very reason for taking the adventure. There have also been teas enjoyed in Stamford, accessed by walking to Burghley House on one occasion and The George Hotel on another. There are now other places in town offering afternoon tea, so maybe we shall have to try those once everything is up and running and we are not away ... but they cannot appear here, of course!

Click on the headings to read the full story of the adventures:

The North Yorkshire Pullman

This was the biggest afternoon tea I have ever had, as well as being delicious. The scones were enormous and I made the mistake of helping out my wife by eating half of her scone, with the result that I was unable to finish my piece of cake - the only tea in this list that I could not finish.

Bucks Fizz was served at the start of the tea which was taken on board a restored Pullman carriage on the steam-operated preserved North Yorkshire Moors Railway.

Marco Pierre White's New York Italian in London

Possibly the weirdest tea in this list, sort of English tradition with an Italian twist via the USA. Not as filling as some, but very nice indeed. Like the North Yorkshire tea above, this one was a gift and we would probably never have discovered it if we had not been given the voucher. Well worth discovering, but not quite what you expect - not that we knew what to expect!

Fortnum and Mason, London

We took advantage of a two-for-one offer on afternoon tea at this famous London store during the pandemic of 2020 when shops and restaurants were open but struggling for trade and having to restrict numbers of customers. This brought the price of the tea down to very expensive from the extremely expensive that it normally is. There was, however, an unlimited amount to eat and drink from the tea menu so although I did not leave anything on my plate there was more I could have had if I had wished. As in North Yorkshire, no dinner or supper was required after this tea! Even the long walk back to our hotel did not work up another appetite. Delicious, and an experience everyone should have at least once.

In passing, I ought to mention that we did once enjoy tea at The Wolseley in Piccadilly, having been given a gift voucher for it, and that was similarly very good and nicely served but the atmosphere, despite the staff's best efforts, was of rush and haste simply because the demand is so high and people are coming in and going out all the time. Fortnum and Mason, at least when we went, was more calm and unhurried.

The Balmoral Hotel, Edinburgh

The Balmoral Hotel in Edinburgh is one of the best hotels we have ever used, and probably the best we have used in Britain, and the afternoon tea offer is fitting to that status. The booking is for two hours, which sounds like plenty for a tea, and it is, but there is so much and it is so enjoyable that the time passes very quickly. We opted for a glass of Champagne and there is an included glass of water as well as a wide choice of teas. There is a selection of savouries and some interesting sandwiches as well as the scones and cakes. The atmosphere in the traditional palm court was calm and unhurried (although I cannot say whether it would have been so outside the pandemic when the hotel would have been busier). Again, no dinner needed that day.

The Royal Hotel, Bath

A cream tea with Champagne was included in a hotel/spa package at The Royal Hotel in Bath. As dinner was also included, it is as well that this was a simple cream tea and not one of the multi-course afternoon teas described above. Two (relatively small) scones each with jam and clotted cream, a pot of tea and a glass of fizz - a lovely addition to a relaxing day. All high quality stuff and served in the bar, so to make it relaxing it is important not to choose a busy time - this bar is used by people waiting for trains at the station across the road, especially after work, so at 5.30pm it can get too busy to find a table, and certainly to relax. But then, maybe that is a bit too late for cream scones if you have a dinner booked for the evening! Treat this tea as a (slightly late) substitute for lunch and all fits in nicely!