I'm starting to sound like a train buff now, who gets excited over trains, but I swear I'm not turning into one. In fact, I have enjoyed my trip on the train because it wasn't exciting. It didn't excite me but rather it calmed me. To become excited about trains would actually decrease my enjoyment because to me the appeal of train is the relaxation it supplies during travel. But I digress.
If you couldn't tell by my random fascination, I don't have much experience on trains. In fact, this was my first proper journey by train (when I was in middle school my family took a midnight train from Newark Airport to BWI because of a cancelled flight, but I don't really think that counts).
We took the train to Edinburgh, connecting through Birmingham, and our entire journey time was a little less than six hours. Although it took a while to get to our destination, travelling by train was a much more enjoyable experience than I expected.
For starters, it's very easy. As long as you have a ticket already, you just show up and can hop right onto the train--no baggage check, no TSA, not even a ticket desk. They handle all of the time consuming administrative stuff--ticket checking, emergency information and announcements--after the train has left the station and your journey has begun. This means that everytime a train stops at a station, it takes no more than 5 minutes before we are on our way again (unless you've arrived at the station early, of course).
Contrasting this with all of the airport rigamarole, and you'll find that travelling by train is much simpler. Last Christmas, my parents couldn't pick me up at High Point so I had to take public transportation to get home to Maryland. My mom suggested Amtrak, but I didn't want to take the train--I thought it would take too long and it's not as exciting as flying--so I booked a flight home instead. When you consider the drive to the airport, the multiple hours you have to be at the airport before your flight to get through security, the time you spend waiting for your flight and then boarding the flight, the actual length of the flight, going through baggage claim, waiting for whomever is picking you up, and the actual drive to your final destination from the airport, you'll find that it would have been a hell of a lot more relaxing, and not that much long, to take the train. Although I'd imagine that the US train system is different form the British rail system, after this experience I'll be sure to give Amtrak a try.
Just because I was pleasantly surprised by the ease of train travel doesn't mean I didn't wish for the 6 hour journey to end or that I didn't experience any annoyances or bumps along the way. It was, after all, a long day of travel on the way to Edinburgh.
I was in charge of deciding what trains we'd take to and from Edinburgh and I learned that there are many ways to get to Edinburgh via train, most with only one transfer. I found that one left at 8:36AM and got into Edinburgh at 2:22PM, including one transfer at Birmingham.
Before we came to England, the four of us purchased BritRail passes. Our 8-day flexipass allows us 8 unlimited days of train travel around Great Britain (England, Scotland, and Wales) and you don't even need to reserve tickets in advance. Saturday was the first day we used our BritRail passes, so we needed to activate it . We decided to allow 30 minutes to get this done at the rail station before our train left to be safe, so we planned to arrive at 8AM.
Unfortunately, the U1 (the Brookes Bus we can ride for free) doesn't run that early on Saturdays so we had to walk down to the Headington Girls School stop to catch the Park and Ride 400. This meant that we had to leave our flat at 7 to catch the 7:38 bus (we're overly careful when we have to catch public transportation on a timetable). This made for an extremely early day. We arrived at the Oxford Rail Station a little before 8 and managed to activate our BritRail in under 5 minutes and we were ready over half an hour before our train left. This was, as you can imagine, frustrating because I am not a morning person at all, so all I could think about was that I could have slept later.
Once on the train to Birmingham, I investigated the purchasable WiFi for my tablet, and a man sitting across the aisle, noticing what I was doing, informed me, quite annoyed, that they blocked YouTube and all the other good sites (I also heard him tell someone on the phone about it as well, so he clearly felt pretty strongly about it). He and his wife were travelling to visit family and bickered like any married couple does regardless of nationality. My favorite snippet:
Man: Can we please stop talking about work?Note that they'd only been speaking for about 5 minutes at this point. I guess men everywhere can only tolerate so much office gossip.
Woman (indignantly): You asked me about it!
Man (grumbling): I didn't think you'd have so much to say.
On our train from Birmingham to Edinburgh, our coach didn't have too many people on it, but there was a group containing young children. The kids' parents were playing music for them that was very loud and I was surprised that they would be so inconsiderate. The people around us were geting annoyed by the music and some even left the car because of it. Everybody was relieved when they got off the train. You could actually feel the atmosphere lighten as everyone let go of their annoyance and were able to appreciate the peace and quiet.
For some reason, I found myself very amused by the buttons you press to make the doors between coaches open. They seemed very futuristic and cool to me. These same types of buttons were used to get into the loo. On this particular train, the bathroom door is curved and does not have handles so if you weren't aware the location of the loo, you would have no clue it was there. This also mean that the only way to open/close the doors is by using their electric buttons. Once in the loo you have to use one button to close the door and another to lock the door. This may be my fear of being walked in on showing, but I couldn't help but realize that if you forgot to lock the door and someone opened the door while you were in the loo, you would have to wait for the door to completely open before waiting for it to close once more, thus prolonging the awkward situation. In short, make sure you lock the door when you use the loo on trains.
Also of note: the handwashing water was so hot that you couldn't even put your whole hand under (and this coming someone who generally uses really hot water). I just don't understand why the one-temperature-only faucet would be set so hot. I've noticed this is many places in the UK.
Okay, back on topic now. We got into Edinburgh on time and in piece, and we dubbed that a success.
For our train home, we traveled down the coast to Newcastle, so we were able to see the ocean, which was interesting because I always forget that we are actually on an island. I was glad we came back a different route because we were able to see a variety of Scottish and English countryside.
On the way back I ran into a flaw of my careful train planning: although I wrote down the time each train arrived where, I didn't include the final destination of the train, so we didn't know which train to get on (the departure boards only list the departure time and final destination). At Waverly Station in Edinburgh, I was able to ask the man what the end destination of the 10AM train to Newcastle was, and he told us Kings Cross and that we should go to Platform 9.
Sidenote: JK Rowling wrote much of Harry Potter and the Sorcerers Stone in Edinburgh and based Hogwarts on a private school in Edinburgh. And we were on a train bound for King's Cross leaving from Platform 9. Coincidence? It can't be. Someone in the train scheduling office obviously loves Harry Potter.
However, our connection at Newcastle was only 7 minutes long, so we knew we wouldn't have time to ask at a desk and dash to our train. We were, however, able to use TheTrainline.com to figure out the end destination of our train from Newcastle to Oxford so we were able to avoid catastrophe. And a good thing too--we got to the train just in time.
There wasn't any music on the train this time, but the woman in front of Caitlin and I was speaking on her phone in Chinese very loudly. The man across the aisle from her was getting very frustrated and kept glancing at her with annoyance.
All in all, our trip back to Oxford was uneventful. We snagged a table seat so all four of us could face each other on one part of the trip. I sat so we were moving backward, as I did, interestingly, on every train we rode on this weekend.
Taking the train to Scotland was definitely worth it and I would certainly recommend it. My Les Mis playlist is coming to an end so I'll leave your here. Check back later this week for more details on my trip to Edinburgh!
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