East Midlands Rover, Day 3

After a rest on the Sunday, I started early on Monday morning to head for another day exploring the railways of Lincolnshire.

0906 Coventry to Nuneaton, arr 0925
Headcode: 2K09, operated by London Midland using Sprinter 153371
Distance: 10 miles; walk-up price: £1.45

I began as I finished on Saturday night with a trip on the shuttle to Nuneaton, on exactly the same train as before, though this time rather more lightly used.

It's a pity that the dash for speed (or, more accurately, capacity) on the WCML has led to the loss of direct Coventry-Leicester trains; while the Coventry-Nuneaton line itself is not in danger of closure, as it is much-used by freight trains, the passenger service is a far cry from what used to be provided, or indeed what Coventry or Nuneaton (or Leicester) deserve.

While a bridge now exists to take Birmingham-Leicester trains over the WCML, this is not usable by Coventry-Leicester trains; either another bridge, or else a reversing siding beyond the bridge (on the line towards Birmingham) would need to be provided in order to avoid having to cross the WCML on the flat.

Unlike Saturday night's brisk seven minute connection, on this occasion I had a full half hour to wait in the quiet airiness of Nuneaton station, to head east to Peterborough:

0952 Nuneaton to Peterborough, arr 1116
Headcode: 1L34, operated by CrossCountry using Turbostar 170112
Distance: 71.25 miles; walk-up price: £16.90

The Birmingham-Stansted service is one of just a handful of east-west cross-country services in the whole of England: it is easy to get into and out of London, or to go north or south, but east or west are that bit more difficult; I suppose it's a natural side-effect of having a long, thin country.

The trains used - Turbostars - are only two carriages long (well, some are three carriages), and as such have to have fairly high-density seating with not much legroom, which doesn't quite seem to befit a long cross-country journey with an end-to-end time of over three hours.

The key difference with true InterCity trains is that not many travel the whole length, most being confined to shorter journeys; but the act of tying all these short local journeys together creates a very useful long-distance link.

On this occasion, we were delayed at Melton Mowbray for about ten minutes while an ambulance attended; a passenger appeared to have been feeling faint, and while they brought the stretcher out in the end he was able to walk - albeit slowly - off the train. He was taken off to hospital and we proceeded without further interruption, arriving at Peterborough only about six minutes late.

I noticed that our late running caused some unusual platforming at Peterborough: we had been booked to use platform 5, but that was occupied by a Norwich-Liverpool service, so we had to occupy platform 4. That meant both platforms on the west side of Peterborough were occupied, so the London-Leeds train which had been due to use platform 4 but now couldn't was instead sent across to use platform 3, on the east side of the station.

This may not sound like much to worry about, but it's an important reminder of the knock-on consequences that small disruptions can have. One of the key reasons we seem to have more disruption than, say, railways on the continent is that we run much closer to maximum capacity: the British are, in many ways, masters of wringing the most out of the network we have.

After buying some lunch in Peterborough, I duly boarded my next train, a stopping service to Doncaster via Lincoln:

1148 Peterborough to Doncaster, arr 1413
Headcode: 2K42, operated by East Midlands Trains using Sprinter 156404
Distance: 93.5 miles; walk-up price: £25.10

The main event of the day was to travel the so-called "Joint Line" from Peterborough to Doncaster via Lincoln. By contrast to the direct fast trains on the East Coast Main Line (via Newark), which take as little as 47 minutes, this service takes nearly two and a half hours. Indeed, it was advertised as the service to Gainsborough Lea Road (our penultimate stop) to avoid unwitting passengers for Doncaster being stuck on it for so long!

On this line we have the perfect example of how the make-do-and-mend approach, which in places means that the British railway network is one of the most efficient in the world, can lead to a really second-rate service for passengers. A perpetuation of timetable cuts in the 1980s, designed to cut costs, compounded by a latter-day shortage of available trains, lead to Lincolnshire (and Lincoln in particular) having one of the most irregular and unfriendly passenger timetables in the country.

The service between Peterborough and Lincoln is approximately hourly between 0830 and 1630. Because the journey time between Peterborough and Lincoln is just under an hour and a half, doing a round trip is a bit tight in three hours; but since they only have three units to use, the service is irregular and occasionally has a gap of an hour and a half.

However, because there are so many level crossings between Spalding and Sleaford, most of which require a local crossing-keeper, that section between Spalding and Sleaford is only open between 0830 and 1715, so that only one shift per day (and not two) is required. This means that the first arrival from Spalding into Lincoln is at 0959, and the last departure is at 1601, which is pretty much useless for commuters.

The Lincoln-Doncaster line, however, is even worse off, with just five trains a day in each direction, at irregular intervals: the next train after this one left five hours after this one. Had I missed my connection at Peterborough I would probably have been required to completely reinvent my plans as a result.

Again, this is mainly due to trying to run the service on fewer trains than are needed for a regular service. In fairness, the services are fairly lightly used, but whether that's a cause or an effect of the sparse train service is not clear.

The train I got is a rare case where the two services are tied together, so we went straight through Lincoln rather than having to change. That said, spending two-and-a-half hours at an average speed of 38mph, partly along jointed track, in a fairly old and relatively uncomfortable Sprinter, looking out over flat countryside, is not perhaps the most enjoyable train ride I have ever had. However, it was an experience, and if nothing else I can tick the line off my list.

I say two-and-a-half hours, but while the timetable said we were due at 1413, the guard announced that we were due to arrive at Doncaster at 1404, and indeed we arrived at 1404, meaning that it was only a little over two and a quarter hours. A curious discrepancy, but not one I can shed any light on.

On arrival at Doncaster I bought a snack, and some drinks, since I didn't expect to have another opportunity to do so for most of the rest of the day. After a half hour observing a remarkably busy station and many trains passing through, I headed east.

1442 Doncaster to Barnetby, arr 1522
Headcode: 1B78, operated by Transpennine Express using Turbostar 170302
Distance: 34.5 miles; walk-up price: £9.65

I repeated the same journey I made on Saturday as far as Barnetby, only this time the usual class 185 Desiro was substituted with a class 170 Turbostar. As detailed above, Turbostars are not my favourite kind of train. A three-car 185 would have been pretty busy with how many people we had; as it was, the two-car 170 was rammed, at least as far as Scunthorpe.

Anyone who thinks that freight trains are a thing of the past should stand at Barnetby for an hour and witness the sheer volume of freight trains passing by: in my hour at Barnetby I counted more than a dozen freight trains coming and going, all heading to or from the docks at Immingham. Most are coal, oil and steel trains, while container trains are very rare.

Barnetby is also a very good place to witness how old mechanical signalling works. While most mainlines have been converted to run on modern colour-light signals, some of the branches of the network remain under the control of semaphore signals controlled by lever frames, and communicating between each other by telegraph wires and bell codes.

Wrawby Junction signal box, just east of Barnetby, is the second-largest mechanical signalbox still operating in the UK today, with 137 levers. (The largest is Severn Bridge Junction box in Shrewsbury.)

Wrawby Junction is where three lines converge for the run towards Grimsby. On Saturday I travelled the lines from Doncaster via Scunthorpe, and from Sheffield via Gainsborough. After an hour or so taking photographs at Barnetby, I completed the trio by taking the line towards Lincoln:

1621 Barnetby to Newark North Gate, arr 1725
Headcode: 2T56, operated by East Midlands Trains using Sprinter 153374
Distance: 45.75 miles; walk-up price: £8.30

This line is another demonstration that none of the four lines radiating from Lincoln have a regular service. The service between Lincoln and Grimsby - a journey of under an hour between the two biggest towns in Lincolnshire - is approximately two hourly (but again fails to be nicely regular).

In this case, the train ran through Lincoln again to Newark North Gate. Newark has two stations: Newark North Gate on the ECML, with direct trains to London King's Cross, and Newark Castle, on the line between Nottingham and Lincoln. There is a curve to connect North Gate station to Lincoln, and we used that curve to get to Newark North Gate.

The service from Lincoln to Newark North Gate is, again, irregular, being sometimes two-hourly and sometimes hourly. Nonetheless, it provides the principal connection between Lincoln and London. There are not currently any through services, though there will be one service a day between Lincoln and London from the timetable change in May. The rest of the time, however, Lincoln has to put up with lousy connections, often being just too tight to be useful or else requiring a long wait at Newark.

We had been running about five minutes late all the way from Barnetby to Lincoln, but the usual padding time put us into Newark just half a minute late. I stepped off the platform, took a breath of fresh air, and got straight back on the same train:

1734 Newark North Gate to Collingham, arr 1742
Headcode: 2T53, operated by East Midlands Trains using Sprinter 153374
Distance: 5 miles; walk-up price: £1.45

In this case, I wanted to make sure I'd been through both stations at Newark, so I headed back towards Lincoln, and changed trains at the first station, Collingham, to come back the other way and head through Newark Castle to Nottingham and on to Leicester.

This was probably the maddest moment of the whole weekend: I changed trains at a station in a sleepy village in the middle of nowhere in Nottinghamshire in order to have travelled on a bit of track that I hadn't been on before. Incidentally, I checked the statistics, and no-one is recorded as interchanging at Collingham in 2009/10, which shows just how mad this particular interchange was.

It was only a five minute connection, and indeed the line was so straight I could see my train coming the whole time, but I made the connection no problem, and settled down for a stopping train all the way back to Leicester.

1747 Collingham to Leicester, arr 1922
Headcode: 2L74, operated by East Midlands Trains using Sprinter 153381+153379
Distance: 49.5 miles; walk-up price: £7.15

Aside from the Sheffield-Lincoln service, which is hourly, the Nottingham-Lincoln service is closest to being a "regular" timetable; there is about one train every hour, but because some of them have only three stops to Nottingham and others have twelve, the departures from Lincoln are a bit unevenly spaced.

Nonetheless, the timetable is considerably better than the other lines radiating from Lincoln, and indeed it was particularly well-used, even if I did chance upon one which did all twelve stops.

Most of the Lincoln-Nottingham services (including this one) continue on to Leicester as stopping trains; I could have gone home via Derby and Tamworth, but I decided that I'd had enough adventure for one weekend so I stayed on the train to head home via Leicester, an hour earlier than I did on Saturday, even if it did mean a full hour-and-a-half on a noisy class 153.

After nearly half an hour in Leicester, which I whiled away chatting on the phone, I boarded my penultimate train of the day:

1949 Leicester to Nuneaton, arr 2008
Headcode: 1N65, operated by CrossCountry using Turbostar 170519
Distance: 18.75 miles; walk-up price: £6.00

Another Turbostar. Fortunately I wasn't on it for long; once again, I had a seven-minute connection at Nuneaton, though again both trains rather quieter than on Saturday night.

2015 Nuneaton to Coventry, arr 2034
Headcode: 2G60, operated by London Midland using Sprinter 153371
Distance: 10 miles; walk-up price: £1.45

My ninth and final train of the day was uneventful, and I headed home by bus to get some dinner and collapse in a heap. Monday's statistics, then:

Total time on trains: 8h 13m.
Total distance travelled: 338.25 miles.
Total price for walk-up tickets: £77.45.

This was, by some distance, the longest day in both time and distance, largely thanks to the early start. It was an enjoyable and interesting day, not least for the hour stood at Barnetby watching freight go by. In my next blog post, I'll summarise the whole East Midlands Rover, and tell you what's next...