All-Line Rover: Night 2 and Day 3

Edit: I forgot the ratings for the London-Bristol train: now added!

So, when we left the action, I was sitting in Glasgow Central at 10:30pm last night. I duly boarded my next train:

2340 'Caledonian Sleeper' Glasgow Central to London Euston, arr 0647
Distance: approx 404 miles, walk-up price: £108.90; I paid £38 for the berth reservation, which is not part of the All-Line Rover.
(Headcode 1M11, operated by First Scotrail using locomotive 90036)

Scenery: N/A - The first train I've ever been on when I didn't look out the window.
Punctuality: N/A - As far as I know, it departed on time and arrived on time, but all I know is that I was awoken at 7am as I requested.
Speed: 6/10 - Just slightly too short for a good night's sleep, and the acceleration and braking was occasionally rousing.
Comfort: 10/10 - Very comfortable, my own wash-basin, room to store my case and rucksack - just perfect.
Staff: 10/10 - The carriage attendant was very helpful and made sure I was up at the right time.

My first experience of a sleeper train was somewhat surreal. Instead of seats, each coach has twelve compartments, which each have two bunks in standard class (and in first class just one). Being new to this I talked to someone, he ticked off my name and showed me to Coach M, where I found my way to Berth 23.

The train was more cramped than I was expecting, but the bed ended up fitting me perfectly. Indeed, had we not been moving I suspect it would have been the best night's sleep I'd had in years. I was worried about having someone else in the other bunk above me, but the train turned out not to be very full and a fair number of people were on their own in the compartments.

But I didn't pay £38 just for a cosy berth: I paid £38 to travel 400 miles whilst asleep. (I could, for the record, have not paid a penny and travelled the 400 miles; but only in the seated coach, rather than in a berth.)

It was very strange going to sleep somewhere in southern Scotland and being awoken - rather suddenly - by the attendant at London Euston. I can't say I slept brilliantly - but at least I slept. However, by this stage, several consecutive nights of not sleeping brilliantly were starting to take their toll.

I got dressed and left the train at about 0740. It was actually slightly disorienting to find myself back at London Euston so early in the morning, and only having been up for 40 minutes. I sat down and checked my email quickly before deciding what to do for Day 3. I had various possible plans lined up but I decided they were all too long and I could do with an early night, so I shortened my plan to do the Wessex lines and decided to do London-Bristol-Weymouth-London.

Hammersmith and City Line, Euston Square to Paddington

Paddington and the Great Western Main Line are synonymous with Isambard Kingdom Brunel, the great engineer who built not only the Great Western Railway but also the Clifton Suspension Bridge and the SS Great Britain. His four-arched roof at Paddington still stands today; there were plans afoot a few years ago to demolish the so-called "Span 4" which encompasses two suburban platforms (13 and 14) and the two platforms (15 and 16) for the Hammersmith and City line, but fortunately they have since been binned, and Span 4 is currently being restored.

0930 London Paddington to Bristol Temple Meads
Distance 118.5 miles, walk-up price £31.70
(Headcode 1C08, operated by First Great Western using an HST and 43140+43127)

Scenery: 6/10 - Some nice countryside but nothing spectacular.
Punctuality: 6/10 - Three minutes down by Reading turned into five late at Bristol due to poor station work and a signal check at Wootton Bassett Junction.
Speed: 7/10 - The train itself is impressively fast, but it had far too many stops.
Comfort: 7/10 - Yes, they ruined the Mark 3s by taking out the old seats, but the new ones are pretty good; the visibility isn't so good, and isn't helped by the seats not lining up with the windows.
Staff: 7/10 - Ticket checks only started at about Swindon, in spite of many people getting off at Reading and Didcot. (Barriers are not the solution!)

Another day, another High Speed Train. This time I sampled - not for the first time - First Great Western's take on the iconic InterCity 125. Once again, I found refurbished Mark 3 coaches. Fortunately, the seats that FGW have installed in their refurbishment are markedly better than those in NXECs HSTs (and their Mark 4 stock), with slightly more padding underneath.

The train was pretty full, with at least half the seats filled until Swindon; for ths first time this week, I was forced to sit going backwards. I was also forced to choose an aeroplane-style seat rather than one of four at a table, largely because there seemed to be just two tables per carriage, much fewer than any other InterCity coach I've been on this week.

This had the nasty side-effect of preventing me access to a plug: NXEC have installed plug sockets for charging laptops and mobile phones at almost all seats, but FGW (like Virgin, actually) have opted only to install them at table seats. I had also asked at Paddington and was told that the trains had wireless internet access: they don't, which was annoying.

A seemingly imperceptible delay put up three minutes late at Reading, and we slowed to perhaps 30mph while waiting to pass Wootton Bassett Junction, the junction west of Swindon where trains to Bristol Parkway and South Wales diverge from the mainline to Bristol, meaning we were five minutes late into Bristol Temple Meads.

I think the reasons were two-fold: one, I guess the delay at Wootton Bassett Junction was due to us waiting for a freight train to Avonmouth to clear the junction, and two, the platform staff and guards displayed an alarming alacrity in getting the train dispatched: we could easily have been back on time at Swindon with some swift platform work. Disappointing, all in all.

On the upside, though, the view was rather nice: we travelled along "Brunel's billiard table" (so-called because the gradients are incredibly gentle, often just 1 in 1000), which follows the Thames Valley from London up as far as Swindon, where we descend back to the coast at Bristol. The countryside is nice and rolling, rather more interestingly so than either the East Coast Main Line or the Great Eastern Main Line, and we got very nice views of Bath on the viaducts either side of the elevated station.

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Bristol Temple Meads station is another of Brunel's masterpieces, with the original peaked roof intact covering platforms 3 to 6. The platform numbering is again slightly odd, with two halves of one platform being numbered differently: while every other station (well, not Edinburgh Waverley) would call them, say, platform 3a and 3b, Bristol calls them platforms 3 and 4. The station is also unusual in having not a footbridge, but a subway, complete with food outlets where I got some lunch.

1149 Bristol Temple Meads to Weymouth, arr 1409
Distance: 87 miles, walk-up price £9.65
(Headcode 2O89, operated by First Great Western using Sprinter 150249)

Scenery: 6/10 - Nice English countryside, but nothing extraordinary.
Punctuality: 3/10 - Right time at Bristol turned into 15 minutes late at Bath with no reason given.
Speed: 5/10 - Pretty slow, really, though I suppose it is a single-track line.
Comfort: 4/10 - The seats themselves weren't terrible but the legroom was abysmally small.
Staff: 7/10 - An excellent ticket inspector (see below) after Westbury, but nothing before Westbury; also marred by annoying automated announcements.

The Heart of Wessex Line, running between Bristol and Weymouth through Bath, Westbury and Yeovil, includes England's longest single-track line, from Castle Cary (20 miles SW of Westbury) to Dorchester (6 miles north of Weymouth). Travelling along it has been described as returning to Hardy's Wessex; the area it passes through is undoubtedly a bastion of English tradition.

To get to the branch line, which I suppose really starts at Castle Cary, we use the Great Western Main Line between Bristol and Bath, then the Wessex Main Line (essentially the Bristol-Portsmouth cross-country route I mentioned on Monday) to Westbury, and then the so-called "Berks and Hants" to Castle Cary, which essentially joined Reading and Taunton by as near a straight line as possible to shave 20 miles off the torturously circuitous route through Bristol which trains to Devon and Cornwall previously had to take. (Bizarrely, some trains still take the route through Bristol!)

It wasn't always this way: the now single-track branch between Swindon and Westbury together with this line from Westbury to Weymouth formed the original Great Western line to Weymouth, which predates both the Berks and Hants *and* the South Western Main Line route through Southampton. Indeed, this is still in evidence at Dorchester: the line from the north to Weymouth is straight, with what is now the mainline to Waterloo curving sharply to the east.

However you call it, the whole route is very pretty, with lots of rolling English countryside, with odd valleys and little towns with small churches dotted around the place, before we hit Dorchester and descend to the coast at Weymouth. It's certainly very nice, but I'm not sure I'd call it anything special.

I was impressed with the ticket inspector who joined us at Westbury: he was thorough without being overbearing, and made sure there were no unnecessary request stops - to the point of asking me how far I was going - as well as telling us immediately why there was a delay at Dorchester. A pity about the automated annoucements, which were overbearing, referring to safety information and minding gaps when you'd just got on the train.

Unfortunately, First Great Western demonstrated their poor punctuality record again (which has led to some calling them "Worst Late Western"). We were twice held at red signals between Bristol and Bath, putting a right-time departure from Bristol (after a 14 minute stand to ensure the train, which starts from Gloucester, is on time!) a full 15 minutes late at Bath.

I assume we were following a slow train; whatever it was, it must have headed towards Swindon, since once we turned right at Bath to head towards Westbury we had a clear run to Dorchester, where we get held twice to let trains on the mainline to Waterloo through. We duly arrived in Weymouth 15 minutes late, forcing a train on the single-track part to wait at Maiden Newton to pass us.

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Weymouth station itself is pretty titchy, with three platforms, two for mainline services to Waterloo and one used by the two-hourly services to Bristol. I headed briefly out of the station to the beach, where I got an ice-cream and took a few photos, before heading back to London:

1503 Weymouth to London Waterloo
Distance 142 miles, walk-up price £32.20
(Headcode 1W24, operated by South West Trains using Desiro 444001)

Scenery: 4/10 - Some interesting coastline, but mostly bland and dull, especially east of Southampton.
Punctuality: 8/10 - Just a little bit too slack; we were consistently about a minute or two late the whole way.
Speed: 7/10 - Pretty good for third rail, but surely Southampton in an hour ought to be possible?
Comfort: 6/10 - The seats were a bit hard and the visibility a little limited, but not as bad as some.
Staff: 9/10 - Careful ticket inspections, just the right frequency of trolley service; if they'd only made one or two fewer announcements it might have been perfect.

I have never understood why Portsmouth, Southampton and Bournemouth, with a combined population of over 1 million people, don't get an InterCity service to London. They get (or used to) InterCity services to Birmingham and the north, so why isn't the service to London called an InterCity service?

I accept that the basic reason is because they're integrated into the South West Trains commuter network, and that Southampton and Portsmouth are only just over an hour away from London. It still seems something of an anomaly.

The service I got from Weymouth to Waterloo, seemed even more an anomaly. For the first hour from Weymouth to Bournemouth, the service was essentially a semi-fast regional service. Then, at Bournemouth, we coupled to another unit (444010), when the train basically turned into a fast pseudo-intercity service to London. To illustrate this: Bournemouth lay just a quarter of the way along the route, but more than half the stops were before Bournemouth.

There were some nice views along the south coast, as well as the sight of a huge mass of containers at Southampton port; otherwise, the journey was disappointingly uninteresting.

The staff livened the journey up a bit: both ticket inspectors I had on this route were clearly not used to people with All-Line Rovers, since both of them took about ten seconds to carefully read the ticket and actually determine that it was valid. This was in complete contrast to the ScotRail train I took last night, on which they barely glanced at the ticket before saying "OK".

Still, I'd much rather have the careful inspector than the casual one (though if I have to get into an argument about it at some point, my mind may change on that!). All in all, the staff were very good, like quiet butlers (well, reasonably quiet), and blended well into the background - no offence to the staff, who are undoubtedly nice people, but I think train staff should blend into the background, so that people can just enjoy the ride.

Anyway, feeling like getting some rest and a decent dinner, upon arrival at Waterloo I headed for M&S on Waterloo station to grab a lasagne (my first decent meal in three days) and still made it up the escalator and along the corridor to Waterloo East in time for the

1801 Waterloo East to New Beckenham, arrive 1826
Distance 8.75 miles, walk-up price £2.45

A nice short day, though I was hoping for more from Bristol-Weymouth. Anyway, including the sleeper train as part of "today", today's statistics are as follows:

Total time spent on trains: 14 hours, 24 minutes.
Distance travelled: 760.25 miles.
Walk-up price: £184.90.

That means that in three days, I've travelled 2017.75 miles, and it would have cost me £453.20. Which is already more than the ticket I paid for. And I've got eleven days left.

Thursday and Friday will explore more of the South West, all being well, so watch this space for more updates!