On a train, however, the journey is often as enticing as the destination. There is the scenery, of course—you can watch your entire route roll by as you ride (with more space and less responsibility than driving a car). There is something about the jostling motion as you chug along (or zoom along, on the fast trains), that has the relaxing effect of sitting in a rocking chair or glider. Of course the seats are roomier than on a plane, and you don’t get that confined feeling that you do on the inside of an airplane seat. All those characteristics make train travel a pleasant and enjoyable mode of travel.
But best of all, on the train you can travel in style without taking out a bank loan. Buying a business class or first class plane ticket is something I could not justify (nor afford), except for using frequent flyer miles or upgrades. However on the train a first class ticket is expensive but affordably so. With just a little bit of planning you can buy a saver first ticket (traveling off peak), a first class Britrail pass (only purchasable in the U.S. in advance of your trip) (Official BritRail Web Site - The Most Celebrated Way to Travel Britain), or, cheapest and best of all, on Saturdays and Sundays standard rail tickets can be upgraded to first class for only £10. I can’t understand why the first class train carriages are not packed to the gills on weekends. If I were traveling in standard class and had the opportunity to upgrade to first for £10, I would do it in a minute. But on Saturday we traveled to Bath in a virtually empty first class, while the standard carriages were packed full, with people even forced to stand.
Now, we came with Britrail passes so we did not have to deal with buying tickets at all. My dad likes to ride the trains, so uses the pass to travel as much and as far as possible. For myself, I went through complicated calculations on whether it would be more cost-efficient to buy the pass in the U.S. or just get tickets at the station (taking into account travel times, travel distances—as long trips are much more expensive than short trips—and availability of upgrades on likely travel days). In the end I threw up my hands and decided to get the pass, so I didn’t have to bother with buying tickets and also to make sure I didn’t end up traveling in standard class due to prohibitively expensive first class tickets, while my parents luxuriated in first class on their senior Britrail passes.
I remember once reading some Rick Steves (Rick Steves Europe Through the Back Door) article where he said you should travel in standard class on trains rather than first so that you could be with “the people” and presumably have a more rewarding trip. Ha! I so disagree. I find my trip much more rewarding when I am not crammed in amongst “the people,” particularly in a full carriage with cramped seats and lots of bodies, some of them crying, whining, or loudly playing children. Consider instead an uncrowded carriage, with roomy seats and plenty of legroom because there is no one sitting across from you unless you choose to sit with them (unless it is a particularly busy time, in which even first class gets full, in which case you especially would not want to be packed into standard). You are free to read a book or magazine undisturbed, or watch the scenery unfold outside your window, disrupted only by the trolley coming through the aisle to offer you complimentary tea, coffee, water, and biscuits.
My father likes to ride the train so much that he will pick his destination as much by the length of the trip as the destination, to ensure as much train time as possible. Now I will admit that I tend to criticize this approach a little bit, as it emphasizes quantity over quality, and omits a lot of perfectly fine destinations just because they are too close to London and too short a train ride to be worth his while. (Or because the train leaves from a station other than King’s Cross or Euston. Another foible of my father—he only travels to cities where he doesn’t have to take the tube to the departure station. That means he only travels from King’s Cross or Euston, which means that a large portion of England, all of the southeast and southwest, are eliminated from his travels.) He also tries to work in so many trips that he leaves himself virtually no time in London. Really, I don’t know when the last time was my dad spent a whole day in London. Well, I do remember a Saturday in 2004 when he went with us to Portobello Road in the morning and Kensington Gardens and the Orangery in the afternoon. And there was a Sunday in 2001 when he stayed to go on the Open Garden Squares Weekend tour.
(Now that was a challenging, fun day. I mapped out a route so that we could travel by bus and walking to visit quite a number of the open garden squares, many of them private squares which are normally only accessible to residents with keys. This year, unfortunately, the Open Squares weekend is the weekend after we leave. Running in the Euston area on Friday and Saturday mornings brought back such recollections, as I saw street names which I associated with some of the squares we saw—Gordon Square, Tavistock Square, of course Bedford Square and Russell Square in Bloomsbury.)
Well, despite all my criticism, I do like to ride the train also, and can truly appreciate the pleasure of a really long train trip in a plushy carriage. (Another fond memory—London to St. Ives, Cornwall, in 2004—several breathtakingly scenic hours along the coast of England, called the Cornish Riviera.) So for our one full day in London before heading to Bath and the Cotswolds, I proposed a day trip to somewhere we could ride the train to. I didn’t mind giving up a day in London because we would be back for several days in June before returning home. Originally I thought I might manage an early morning trip to Bermondsey Market beforehand, but decided to skip it in favor of getting a reasonably early start.
We decided to go to Durham, a university town in Yorkshire, somewhat north of York on the GNER rail line. Durham’s main feature, other than the university, is Durham Cathedral, billed as the “finest Norman cathedral in England, perhaps the world” (to paraphrase the promotional literature). Taking the 9:30 a.m. train would get us there at 12:32, leaving several hours to explore before catching a return train.
As always, the train trip passed quickly (so unlike airplane travel), and we were soon walking down a long hill into the city.
One of the major features in the city centre is Durham’s large Indoor Market. The Market boasts over 200 stalls (okay, that’s a wild guess, because I cannot remember the number at all), selling everything from fresh fish and meats, to fruits and vegetables, clothing, beauty products, CD’s and DVD’s, buttons and sewing notions, books, toys, electronics, herbs and spices, and pretty much anything you can imagine. 
We escaped the market without a purchase, but were brought down by a Waterstones shop (a chain bookstore), where I succumbed the lure of a 3-for-the-price-of-2 book sale, and my mother stocked up on M.C. Beeton mysteries.Durham’s cathedral was, as promised, grand and beautiful.
We strolled through while church officials were bustling about setting up for a 3 p.m. service, slipping out before the service began. I had another communion in mind, my first pilgrimage to the altar of clotted cream—that is, scones and cream in a local tearoom, a quaint little basement shop called Rumbletums.
After tea we decided to hustle back to the railway station in hopes of catching the 4:07 train to London (an hour earlier than we had originally planned). After all, once you’ve been to the Cathedral and had tea, what more is there to do? My mother somewhat dreaded the long walk back up the hill to the station, but as so often the case, the return trip seemed much shorter than the outgoing one, and we topped the hill with time to spare (especially as the train ended up delayed by about 10 minutes).
The return train trip was not as idyllic as the outgoing trip, as the carriage was quite full and we didn’t have the privacy and solitude we had enjoyed earlier. My dad said, knowingly, that he had expected it would be crowded, as it was late afternoon on a Friday, but I still can’t understand why there would be a rush of people traveling in to London on Friday night. Leaving London, I could understand.
But we were amongst the many coming back into London on Friday night—though in our case it was to pack our bags and prepare for departure to Bath and the Cotswolds the following day.
We finished the evening with a pick-up supper from our local Waitrose (a supermarket just down the street from the hotel), and my favorite, Battenburg Cake for dessert (checkerboard squares of pink and white cake layered with apricot jam, and wrapped in almond paste). Mmm, yummy.
