Getting to Middlesbrough

This is a bonus post to my Middlesbrough blogpost. I'm writing it because the actual journey to get there was far too long and dull to not blog about it afterwards, and also because I technically broke new ground in my county visiting checklist.

I got up exceptionally early in my neck of the woods, just to get to King's Cross station. It being a Friday, the transport options in the morning were already scarce - no Night Tube just yet. But it being a Good Friday also meant other services were likely to be worse than usual. Personally, I'm not a big fan of public transport anyways - it's less comfortable, often very inconvenient, and quite scruffy at the worst of times. And yes, I get the irony. But sometimes, you don't have better options.

 

My train was an LNER service running all the way up to Aberdeen. My dad suggested this was the longest train service in the UK, and though it's not actually the longest, it may as well have been for me. Up at 5 in the morning, catching a train that would take nearly three hours, and even then I'd still need to change elsewhere. There are no direct trains to Middlesbrough from London, at least not regular ones. 

At the platform

The train ride itself wasn't terrible going up north. I managed to get a seat, which was nice, even if come York we had to switch for a family that had just come on board. I listened to a few albums, and ended up dozing off midway through one of them. I looked out the window for far too long, saw a power station amidst the distant greenery. And whilst it wasn't exciting, far from it, it wasn't as mind-numbing as I'd imagined it would be.

 

Darlington

We got off at Darlington around 8am, with around half an hour until our train to Middlesbrough. Now I'm not sure if being at a station, but not leaving the premises, counts as being in the town, but if it does, then I've been in County Durham.

Darlington station

The station's quite nice, with its rounded roof that lets light glisten down to the platform, but unless you like staring at that roof for ages, you'll probably revert to doing what I did - nothing, just waiting for time to pass by. There weren't any shops yet open at the time, at least none I could find, so I had to resort to a vending machine in the waiting room. 

But soon enough, my train came, a proper rusty metal skeleton operated by Northern Trains. This was on the Tees Valley line, running up to Saltburn, which partially follows the route of the first ever steam-powered railway - the Stockton and Darlington Railway. This line is also home to two stations beloved by railway anoraks - Teesside Airport and Redcar British Steel, both infamous for barely being used by anyone. But my port of call was Middlesbrough, where I finally arrived following four hours of train travel.

Getting back home

After a football match, the trains are naturally more crowded because the last thing anyone wants is to have to stay behind in an unknown town for the night. That also means the experience is far less pleasant, as most seats will now be occupied and you can't just hope you'll be the first onboard because you left so early. And yeah, I guess a solution to all this is to leave a match early, but who would want to do that?

I took a train to York this time, with a subsequent connection from there to King's Cross. I was back on the Northern Rail metal canisters for the first leg of the trip, and I was lucky enough to get a seat this time. 

York is another decent-looking station, though I can't show that because I took no photos - I was clearly more preoccupied with getting home than any future blogging I might do. This time, it was only ten minutes before I boarded the next train, which took similarly long to get down to King's Cross, but now had fewer stops along the way. 

Not that I'd see those stops because I spent the next three hours quite literally staring at a blank wall. I was stuck in that part of a train near the doors and the corridor which guides you to another carriage. There were no available seats anywhere - some people had resorted to sitting on the carriage floor for the next three hours. There were plenty of bottles strewn on the floor by the end, likely from people who got off at Grantham and didn't take them. Three hours of that left me jaded by the end, and I half wondered if the journey as a whole was worth it come the end.

But I did get home before the sunset, so the journey wasn't that terrible, I suppose. It's more a matter of me disliking trains, and not wanting to spend eight hours in a day travelling on them. I suppose everyone views travelling differently, but most can agree trains aren't that great. Bodes well for my aviophobia, then.

Additional map colouring section

My England county map thus looks more colourful now:

I know that only the most chronically obsessive blogger would say they haven't been in a place because they haven't actually stepped outside the station, but I'm one of them and so I'll claim I've never actually been in County Durham...as in, I've barely been there. But my Yorkshire conquest is going well right now, with two out of four now visited (and blogged about). 

Either way, that map is kind of a lie. Middlesbrough is the most northern town I've ever been in, which is what matters most. My horizons are being gradually broadened.