On Monday morning, we said goodbye to our hotel in Edinburgh and headed first on a return trip to Glasgow. There are no fewer than four direct routes between Edinburgh and Glasgow, two of which serve Glasgow Central (high level), one of which serves Glasgow Queen Street high level, and one of which serves Glasgow Queen Street low level. In order to cover all four of them eventually, this morning we took a return trip to Glasgow Central:
0911 Edinburgh Waverley to Glasgow Central (via Carstairs), arr 1026
Headcode: 1S99, operated by CrossCountry using Voyager 221121
Distance: 57.25 miles; walk-up return: £13.05
Our first route to Glasgow is also the longest, and until recently was the only one which was electrified. However, the fourth route, via Airdrie and Bathgate, which opened earlier this year, is now also electrified; ironically, all bar one of the trains on this route via Carstairs are operated by diesel trains!
Until the new East Coast timetable was brought in in May, this route was served every two hours or so by East Coast trains to London King's Cross via Newcastle and York, and these were almost always run by electric trains. However, in order to have enough trains to run the rest of their proposed service, all but one of the East Coast trains to Glasgow was withdrawn.
In order to maintain the level of service between York, Newcastle, Edinburgh and Glasgow, CrossCountry were called upon to extend their hourly service between Plymouth and Edinburgh to run to Glasgow every two hours. Since most of the lines CrossCountry run over are not electrified, this means the Edinburgh-Glasgow service via Carstairs is no longer provided by electric trains but by diesel Voyagers.
So it was that we ended up on a CrossCountry Voyager for the hour-and-a-quarter long trip to Glasgow Central. The route via Carstairs essentially manages to avoid almost all of the built-up areas near Edinburgh, and only when you get to Motherwell and the outer suburbs of Glasgow does the route become urban; the line is otherwise in open countryside.
Indeed, it was never really intended as an Edinburgh to Glasgow route; in reality, Carstairs is a triangle junction: the three legs of the triangle lead towards Edinburgh, Glasgow, and south to Carlisle and on towards Preston and London. The original intended use of the lines was for trains from Carlisle to head to Edinburgh and Glasgow; this third side of the triangle between Edinburgh and Glasgow was a later addition.
(In order to get round the fact that the ticket was valid from 09:15 on weekdays, but our train left at 09:11, we bought a single to Haymarket - which, valid on CrossCountry only, cost just 85p with a railcard! - because our train left Haymarket at 09:16 and our rover ticket was thus valid from Haymarket. Not that the ticket inspector seemed to care, but never mind.)
We approached Glasgow through the busy approaches on the West Coast Main Line through Motherwell, and got held for not one but two suburban trains to cross our path at Newton; we arrived in Glasgow Central on time, and I suspect this is down to the CrossCountry path having some slack in it for exactly that purpose. In this case, however, given the complexity of the Glasgow suburban network - something which we will undoubtedly discover for ourselves later in the week - it's hard to imagine being able to substantially improve the timetable without ending up breaking something else.
We arrived in Glasgow Central station with a half-hour wait to our next train to go back along one of the other routes to Edinburgh. Glasgow Central one of the nicest big stations in the country: while it's not as architecturally stunning as, say, London St Pancras or even Manchester Piccadilly, it is nonetheless a rather nice station, with lots of air and space, lots of amenities, and no automatic ticket barriers.
Our train from Edinburgh formed one of the most distant departures from GlasgoW: it became the 10:59 to Penzance, calling at no fewer than 35 calling points along the way, taking very nearly 12 hours. Of course, almost no-one uses the whole length, but it provides so many overlapping opportunities that would be lost if the train were simply to run to Birmingham and have a separate train from Birmingham to Penzance. Nonetheless, it's still slightly disorienting to see Penzance on the departure board at Glasgow Central.
Our train back to Edinburgh duly arrived, and we boarded:
1105 Glasgow Central to Edinburgh Waverley (via Shotts), arr 1210
Headcode: 1Y80, operated by First Scotrail using Sprinter 156433
Distance: 47.25 miles; walk-up return included above
The route via Shotts essentially forms a cut-off of the route via Carstairs: it shortens the distance to Edinburgh by a full ten miles, while passing through areas of significant population in Lanarkshire and West Lothian, most notably Livingston and Shotts. This route diverges from the West Coast Main Line north of Motherwell, thus avoiding Motherwell in favour of Bellshill and other suburbs, and rejoins the route via Carstairs near Calder.
The ends of the route - those parts shared with the Carstairs route - are thus electrified, but the portion in the middle is not, although the Scottish government is considering "filling in" all the routes in the central belt with electric wires.
In comparison to the previous train, this was a small two-car diesel multiple unit and was definitely a local train rather than a long-distance train, but it was well-used (probably better-used than the five-car Voyager). The Shotts route is served twice an hour; one train an hour which, like ours, is semi-fast, calling only at about six stations en route, and one train an hour which calls at all 17 stations but takes a bit longer. The fact that we were on a semi-fast train meant that we were back in Edinburgh in just an hour and five minutes, with ample time to make our next connection.
I started out thinking that Edinburgh Waverley was, at first glance, confusing and oddly laid-out. However, in practice, to the layman who doesn't care about the track layout, it's actually a very well laid-out station, with the majority of platforms having level access from the concourse, and good and convenient amenities. The one drawback is that the layout constrains the amount of circulation space available, but Network Rail are working on improving both space and access to the station.
We left Edinburgh for the last time (at least for a few days) on the last of the major suburban lines around Edinburgh which we hadn't done, the so-called Fife Circle:
1239 Fife Circle Inner Rail, Edinburgh Waverley to Inverkeithing (via Glenrothes), arr 1411
Headcode: 2K01, operated by First Scotrail using Sprinter 158741
Distance: 58.25 miles; walk-up price: £5.60
The Fife Circle is a not-quite-circle-shaped collection of suburban lines in, unsurprisingly, Fife. The line runs north from Edinburgh across the Forth Bridge to Inverkeithing, where the line splits in two. The western branch heads through Dunfermline and Cowdenbeath, while the eastern branch heads through Burntisland and Kirkcaldy, before meeting at Glenrothes.
Trains therefore run in a teardrop shape: from Edinburgh trains head to Inverkeithing, before running either clockwise or anticlockwise around the loop and back to Inverkeithing, before heading back to Edinburgh. In our case, we went anticlockwise, so we thus passed through Inverkeithing, then Kirkcaldy, Glenrothes, Cowdenbeath, Dunfermline and back to Inverkeithing.
The Forth Bridge is one of the iconic railway bridges in the country, and in the clear sunshine we got very good views from the bridge over to the Forth Road Bridge. Better still, the line towards Kirkcaldy curves to the east, giving a view back to the Forth Rail Bridge further along the line.
The rest of the line was actually a fairly bland suburban line, with towns relatively sparse through fairly open countryside, and a few showers of rain interrupting an otherwise relatively fine day.
We went round the loop all the way back to Inverkeithing, where we alighted to join our next train to Aberdeen; we ended up with half an hour to wait because we couldn't quite have made it to Edinburgh in time to pick up the train there.
1447 Inverkeithing to Aberdeen, arr 1709
Headcode: 1S11, operated by East Coast using HST 43296 + 43306
Distance: 117.25 miles; walk-up price: £25.95
We opted to take an East Coast train up the coast to Aberdeen, on the basis that, given it was a nine-coach train, there should be plenty of room. Boy, were we wrong.
This is one of three through trains a day between London and Aberdeen: given it leaves London at 10:00 and arrives at Aberdeen at 17:09, it is the perfect train for everyone heading north for a holiday to catch, and this was borne out by the fact that every seat was taken, people were standing in the vestibules, with some even resorting to sitting on their luggage, since every luggage rack, vestibule, corner, nook and cranny was overflowing with cases and bags of every inconvenient shape and size conceivable.
And to think that the Chief Executive of East Coast, Elaine Holt, wants to end through trains between London and anywhere north of Edinburgh! Scotland does not end at the central belt!
Through trains to Aberdeen and Inverness lead to far more people heading north, simply because it avoids having to change trains. People do not, in general, like having to change trains, especially at huge stations at Edinburgh Waverley, and even having three through trains to Aberdeen and one through to Inverness each day is of huge benefit to all those heading to Scotland on holiday or on business.
Not only was every seat taken, most of the seats were reserved. There were seats reserved from London to Montrose (just two stations south of Aberdeen), from York to Aberdeen, from Newcastle to Dundee, from London to Leuchars (for St Andrews), and many other such through journeys across Edinburgh. There were six coaches of standard class; I suspect if there had been ten coaches of standard class we would still have felt cramped. Never before have an HST has felt small.
So for an hour and a half, until Montrose, the three of us stood in the vestibule between the last coach of standard class and the buffet car. This was actually quite a good decision, since this meant we were by the doors, and - this being a slam-door train - the doors had push-down windows, meaning we could get good clear photographs.
The route passes over the Tay Bridge just south of Dundee, which opened in 1887 to replace the original bridge which collapsed in 1879. The bridge is over two miles long, and was described by Ulysses S. Grant as "a big bridge for a small city". Last time I did this route, on the All-Line Rover, the weather was so bad that I couldn't even see the Tay Road Bridge just a couple of miles away; this time, however, the visibility was good, even if it was a little overcast, and we got some very good views of both bridges.
We finally got a table to sit at after Montrose, for the last half-hour of the journey. However, in another demonstration of how much slack East Coast's new timetable has, having run five minutes late the whole way from York, we arrived five minutes early at Aberdeen - or rather, on time thanks to the five minutes public adjustment that most trains seem to have.
We had an hour at Aberdeen before catching our next train, so we headed to the adjacent shopping centre for dinner in Nando's, before returning for our final onward train to Inverness:
1820 Aberdeen to Inverness, arr 2033
Headcode: 1H39, operated by First Scotrail using Turbostar 170404 + Sprinter 158721
Distance: 108.25 miles; walk-up price: £17.30
The Aberdeen-Inverness line is the second route to Inverness, built by the very grandiose-sounding Great North of Scotland Railway. The line is, like Perth-Inverness, single track with passing loops, with only one five-mile loop and the rest only short loops at stations.
Strangely, the Aberdeen-Inverness route is busier, with 11 trains a day to just nine on Perth-Inverness; both get roughly two-hourly services with odd extra trains and irregular patterns, and, in an ideal world, both would have an hourly service, but the constraints of the single-track sections make this, at present, impossible to timetable.
Our train was, remarkably, five cars long, with a three-car Turbostar unceremoniously juxtaposed with a two-car Sprinter; the Sprinters have doors on the ends in order to provide a gangway between coupled units, but the Turbostars do not, instead having rounded noses, meaning our train looked a bit odd. Moreover, the lack of connection meant that the trolley could only operate in the three-car Turbostar, which we gladly found ourselves in.
While the scenery on the line was undoubtedly very nice, we were all a bit tired at the end of a long day and managed somehow not to pay that much attention, and dozed, chatted, and discussed plans for the following day, with the two-and-a-quarter hour journey to Inverness seemingly passing quite quickly.
We arrived in Inverness after a long day and got a taxi to our hotel, another Travelodge, this time a rather quieter one near the retail park on the eastern outskirts of the city centre, and retired ready for Tuesday: a day trip on the Far North Line to Wick.
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