I said, many years ago, that once my career employer no longer needed my services then I would buy a 14-day first class All Lines Rover and start exploring the country by train. That day came in 2006. My aims on that first trip were unclear but I travelled to Fort William on the sleeper. I rode some lines I’d always wanted to, including Settle – Carlisle and the Heart Of Wales line. This trip wasn’t all about the rails. I visited friends in Saltburn and Sheffield. I went to the Anderton Boat Lift, the Falkirk Wheel and Durham Cathedral.
Little planning went into that fortnight. That may have been a good thing as plans for this type of trip don’t seem to last. There’s disruption on the network, or you struggle to find accommodation. Sometimes you have a bright idea and just do it, existing plans forgotten. That’s the beauty of a Rover.
I went on Rovers every couple of years or so but then it struck me that I’d ridden the great majority of the UK rail network. I’d covered every part of the network in Wales and all of the long-distance lines in England and Scotland. Why not finish the job?
I turned my attention first, in May 2024, to Scotland and bought a Spirit of Scotland Travel Pass. This covered the whole country’s rail network as well as the Glasgow Subway and some buses and coaches. It’s excellent value and in a week I was able to ‘finish’ Scotland, although my stations per day average was brought down by the trip all the way to the north just to tick off a single station, Wick. But – three days after my journey home – Scotrail reopened the Leven branch. So I’d have to go north again.
This week I did just that. I also went south, to visit the only station in Cornwall I’d missed. Leven isn’t the only recent reopening, there’s also Easington in the north-east of England. I still had a lot of Greater Manchester’s commuter lines to visit, although in truth I didn’t have a great feel for how extensive my travels in that area would need to be. And there was the odd branch here and there that had, somehow, eluded me in the past. This site tells you what I did, how I did it and my reflections along the way.
My Quest
My quest on this trip is to complete my tour of the UK rail network. My definition of complete is quite loose. The plan is to travel on all lines covered by National Rail train operating companies. I exclude all other railways, including London Underground, trams, Tyne and Wear Metro and heritage lines. I want to have stopped at or passed through every station on the network. I’m not trying to cover every curve or chord, or those odd very early morning routes some trains take – unless they interest me sufficiently for some reason or other.
To complete a task like this you need a record of where you’ve already been. The problem is that I don’t have such a record. In the early days I didn’t keep very full notes and my knowledge of the UK’s geography, and specifically its railway network, was much poorer than it is today. Therefore there’s been some guesswork although I have started with the assumption that a line has not been travelled unless I have a record, or a strong memory, that it has.
Anyway, here goes.