‘You can walk virtually everywhere in England by using the train’: the man connecting rail-based walks
You can walk everwhere in England as long as you don’t try walking there.
‘You can walk virtually everywhere in England by using the train’: the man connecting rail-based walks
You can walk everwhere in England as long as you don’t try walking there.
Until the mid 1960s you probably could.
Ireland too.
“virtually’ doing the heavy lifting there. I’m sure it’s perfectly possible to find nice walks accessible by train but let’s not pretend you can move around the UK conveniently without a car. Especially if you want to go anywhere rural.
Trains are useful for travel between the centres of towns and cities but not much else and buses are a total waste of time.
And the ridiculous cost of train travel only gets mentioned in the penultimate paragraph.
Yes, lets go to the railway station where we can get stabbed, to get on a train to also get stabbed so we can go to the countryside for a walk and get trampled by some cows…
…then stabbed.
On the other hand, if this encourages a few guardianistas to get off the road, then great.
Sounds like an interesting project. I wonder what its like hiking from Bath Spa, the accompanying photo is no help:
I was going to say only in the Guardian, but I suspect most of our newspapers would have done something similar.
Marius, places like the Derbyshire Peaks, the Lakes, Cornwall and the like have quite good bus services for hikers often letting you jump on and off on a single ticket so you don’t have to keep finding circular walks. Of course there’s the cost of getting there.
So fine if you’re an former uncivil servant who retired early on a pension you didn’t have to pay the full cost off in your early 50’s, who can afford the exorbitant cost of rail travel.
For the plebs though, working themselves to death for a pension that keeps getting pushed further out of reach? Not so much.
Keep working pleb. Someone needs to pay for my gold-plated pension.
“A British railway station can be many things. A place of tended flowers and toytown paintwork. A concourse of shuttered ticket booths and overpriced pasties. A terminus, a meeting spot, a gateway to escape. It can be heart-lifting or drab, bathed in birdsong or heaving with commuters…”
Or a third-world toilet-hole, a filthy assemblage of pimps, gangs of feral youths, solitary berobed beardies staring fixedly at women, and the floridly insane.
There is book of Walks along disused railway lines – there are a few good ones within a short drive (and a short one, not in the book, that I walk along several times a year to get to the town at the other end) BUT there are lots of places in England, let alone Scotland or Wales, that the average guy/gal could not reach in a *comfortable* day’s walk. Since Middleton-in-Teesdale Station was closed in 1965, the many enjoyable walks in Upper Teesdale have been accessible by many means of transport but not by train.
To reach High Force by train now, you travel to Darlington by train and then take a series of buses, with some walking, over the next three hours (bit short of two hours on buses), to cover 29 miles – for most people that is further than they want to walk in a day. High Force is a great base from which to start a walk but you don’t want to walk 29 miles from Darlington before you start!!
Of course you can walk to anywhere in England if you use a chain of Youth Hostels for several days after getting off the train …
“Steve acknowledges that relying solely on trains can pose problems for hikers – ”
I’m guessing this is not our Steve but some imposter.
There’s a nice walk to be had from Warrington Central to Warrington Bank Quay. You can buy a pie at a choice of bakeries, Waterfields being quite good, see a statue of Oliver Cromwell, and visit a ‘Spoons.
Heck, there might be a book opportunity for such walks, Baghill to Monkhill, Marylebone to Paddington and many others.
By the same logic, you can walk virtually everywhere in Europe by using the train.
And you can walk virtually everywhere in the World by using the plane.