Since the first time I travelled on a train without my parents (I was 14 and, clearly in search of the high life, I went to Wigan with two friends to watch my football team Wrexham), I have seen the end of smoking on platforms, the demise of closed-door trains and the dreaded Pacer carriages, the rise of coffee shops and the ‘innovation’ of ticket gates.
Thirty years after that first journey (the engine was late and the ticket office at Chester, where we changed, was a Portakabin), I, as a visually impaired non-driver and travel writer, have walked, waited, drunk and even slept in at least 400 British railway stations. Much has changed in that time and much has remained, with almost heroic stubbornness, exactly the same. Here are my thoughts on the best and most desperate places in Britain to wait for your delayed 1046 service where, if you’re lucky, “there won’t be a trolley service today.”
The five I like the most
Hebden Bridge
If you regularly dream about a train, it alternates with images from the time of Philip Larkins Pentecost weddings, then it’s Hebden Bridge’s turn.
“All windows open, all pillows warm, all sense. Of haste gone,” wrote the Bard of Hull. And despite being firmly in Ted Hughes country, the station has embraced these lines and withstood modernity with exquisite resilience. The station signs are all still written in white sans serifs on black backgrounds, there is a lamp room, signal box, hanging baskets and original globe lamps.
The only problem comes when you realise you’re ruining the atmosphere because you’re not wearing a trilby, reading the Daily Sketch and smoking a Park Drive cigarette.
London Marylebone
The capital’s most civilised main station hasn’t changed all that much since the Beatles passed through it in the early 2000s. A well-earned rest more than sixty years ago.
It feels more like a departure point for a ruggedly pretty Shropshire market town. The hanging baskets and easy access to the six platforms make for a wonderfully relaxing experience. But it’s only useful if you’re travelling to Oxford, Birmingham or the Chilterns.
Marylebone is also home to one of London’s best railway hotels: the old Grand Central Hotel, now The Landmark, with a glass-roofed winter garden complete with palm trees, balustrades and the sound of clinking champagne glasses.
Cromford
Cromford station is located a few miles from Matlock Bath, a coastal-themed town in Derbyshire that is actually 70 miles from the nearest coastline. The station eschews such faux novelty and is instead perhaps the quintessential British country railway station.
Normally there is only one train per hour from here, but you won’t mind if you have to wait 59 minutes for the next one; that’s how rural the atmosphere is here.
This is a place to read a chapter of William Makepeace Thackeray (rather than scribble a Sudoku) while gazing out over the green woodlands of the Derwent Valley and pondering the possibility of renting out the old stationmaster’s house on the distant (now disused) platform. It’s a gabled curio that once graced the sleeve of an Oasis single and is now a self-catering cottage.
Wemyss Bay
It is worth making the trip to Wemyss Bay, from where ferries chug to the Isle of Bute, to disembark at this Grade II listed station. Built in 1903, it was designed to get passengers and their luggage off the train and onto the ship without exposing them to the excessive hoolie winds blowing in from the Firth.
The result is a masterpiece of glass and ironwork, combining multiple architectural styles. It looks well thought out yet effortlessly elegant.
In addition, right opposite the Tudor-style entrance is McCaskies, one of Scotland’s finest butchers and bakers, with a spacious café attached serving sublime haggis, pies, tattie scones and steaks, which you can eat in or take on the ferry to the island.
Pitlochry
Perhaps the most wonderful experience of rail travel in Britain is being woken up in your cabin on the Caledonian Sleeper to Inverness at 6am by a gentle knock on the door. You are then handed a tray containing a bacon roll and a steaming mug of coffee.
After opening your window curtains, you can sip your coffee in bed and watch the Scottish Highlands pass by: valleys, dark forests and shimmering mist, interrupted only by the occasional glimpse of small stations like Pitlochry.
If you request to get off here, you will be rewarded (in summer at least) with the feeling that you have stepped into a John Buchan novel.
Before you disembark and follow the River Tummel or climb the looming mountain peaks, take a moment to browse the quaint bookshop now housed in one of the station buildings. You can also admire the locomotive-shaped whisky barrel outside.
Then take a deep breath. This is the city that attracted disabled patients in the 19th century thanks to Queen Victoria’s physician, who declared the air in these parts to be exceptionally clean.
The five I like the least
London Euston
“Run, my God, run, now, now now.” This is the predictive mantra that will be running through your head as you and hundreds of other people who haven’t booked their tickets nine months in advance slide across the deathly slippery floor of Euston station when that gnomic announcer announces that your train will be leaving in about six minutes from the platform you’re on. always how far away you stand.
As retirees, children and foreign exchange students who are not at home here peculiar London ritual, spread out to the four winds, you and your huddled panting brethren will find yourself in one of the downward sloping “waiting rooms” leading down to the platforms, where your path to the train will be blocked by a team of ticket clerks.
As other passengers’ suitcases roll over your feet, your ticket is forensically examined. Eventually, with great reluctance, you are allowed to board your train. But you don’t get your breath back, or your blood pressure normalized, until you are well north of Milton Keynes.
Warrington Bank Quay
Fans of Terry Gilliam’s dystopian masterpiece Brazil much to enjoy the hellish industrial view from the platforms at Warrington Bank Quay. It may make Le Corbusier’s heart swell, but it only makes us commuters yearn for a strong drink.
Your view on one side is completely dominated by the abandoned Unilever detergent factory; an oily sludge of pipes, towers and windowless buildings. The view from the other side of the platforms is a car park and a grim row of Victorian terraced houses.
Get used to looking at the factory as well as the houses; a whopping 67 percent of the trains that ran here were delayed in the past three months.
Chester
If St Pancras is the wedding cake of 19th-century station architecture, then Chester Station is a two-day-old Gregg’s pie eaten by pigeons.
The station’s flat, featureless facade is a blasphemous mid-Victorian statement. It is insanely long on either side of the entrance, until it merges into a goods yard and a tattoo parlour.
Wander along the main road that stretches out in front of the station entrance and you will soon discover that, far from the historic centre of Chester, you are actually a good mile away at the end of a windy and unattractive road. A strong shout for the dullest medium-sized station in England.
Sunderland
This is the train station that gives you the clearest possible idea of what it would be like to live an alternative life as a caveman. All the platforms are completely underground thanks to the excellent work of the British Rail architects who decided to cover up the previous incarnation of the station in the mid-1960s.
A few months ago, a new station entrance and waiting room were opened with much fanfare. These were placed on the ground floor in a daring way, so that there was room for modern gadgets such as windows.
The new building, however, has an interior like an abandoned Amazon warehouse, without the goods – save for a few tiny rows of sadistically uncomfortable chairs. A solecism of a station with the soul and flamboyance of a wet shopping bag.
Darlington
Okay, so this is where the whole railway story begins, with George Stephenson’s Locomotion travel between here and Stockton 200 years ago. And it’s hard not to be impressed by Darlington’s epic roof and magnificent platform clock.
But the winds that blow through the station ensure that it is always bitterly cold. This is a station where pigeons are regularly seen wearing Gore-Tex, where piping hot coffee in Styrofoam cups turns to ice.