Jim pitched up before 8 this morning to take me to Bristol Parkway to catch a train to Inverness, the northernmost city in the United Kingdom if you ignore The City and Royal Burgh of Kirkwall which is, technically, a mere town. We didn’t need to leave until about 0845: that is until Jim remembered that his phone and wallet were still at his house. Fortunately his house is roughly on the way to Bristol so we left Home Farm at 0830, picked up the missing goods and proceeded. Jim’s car is subject to the Bristol Ulez so we needed to find a way round the zone which involved a lot of minor roads and then dicing with heavy lorries once we had reached the ring road. Anyway, we arrived in plenty of time in a light drizzle and I collected a sheaf of tickets from the machine. I had used Trainline to book the journey on split sections which meant I had three separate tickets and bike reservations: the upside was that it cost £73.49 which compares favourably with the cost of flying and doesn’t involve my least favourite travel pastime of waiting in airports.
The Cross country service to Birmingham arrived on time from Plymouth and I couldn’t help but notice that it went all the way to Edinburgh up the east coast, stopping in many of the places I shall be visiting. I hung my bike up in the designated spot and found a seat on a very crowded train.
My ticket gave me 12 minutes to change to the Avanti west line service at Birmingham involving a lift up from Platform 8 and down to Platform 7, comfortably achieved but now involved locking my bike into a forward compartment behind the driver with no way of getting to it before Edinburgh. I found a comfortable seat at a table and dozed as we went north, waking occasionally to look out at Crewe, Preston and Lancaster before we made our way over Shap Fell, a serious climb on a bike – which I did in 2015 – but seemingly effortless for the train. Down down down to Penrith and on through Carlisle and the gentle rolling hills of southern Scotland. At this point the conductor informed us that the train was running 20 minutes late: as I had 15 minutes to change at Edinburgh for Inverness this was a trifle disconcerting but there wasn’t much I could do about it. Half an hour later he updated us with the information that if we changed at Haymarket, short of our destination at Waverley we stood a good chance of catching the Inverness train heading in the opposite direction, running as late as we were. So that, dear reader, is what happened. I made it down to platform 4 as the train came in and was able to hang Lucy up by her front wheel and breathe a sigh of relief.
Our route was the reverse of the journey I made on my bike in 2021, taking about 2.5 hours against the two days it took me on a bike. We passed Gleneagles and Perth and up the Tay valley to Pitlochry and then shadowed the A9 over Drumochter pass – at 452m the highest railway line in the UK – and then down through Kingussie and Aviemore before we eventually arrived in Inverness early and in the daylight.
I wheeled the bike with two very heavy panniers to the King’s Highway, one of Wetherspoon’s finest. I’ve eaten there in the past but this time I had a room booked. Inverness is an expensive place to stay but I figured it was worth paying a bit over the odds to be close to the station with cheap food and drink available after a lengthy journey.
Tomorrow is a relatively easy day, 55 miles and not much climbing but rain is forecast from about 2pm.