#Longest rail route in the world full#

This yomp across England takes in vast tracts of scenic and varied countryside. Photograph: TM O Travel/Alamy Norwich to Liverpool Lime Street Further info from FOUR MORE SCENIC BRITISH RAIL JOURNEYS The Vault pop-up has moved into the re opened Old Coastguard in Mousehole. Accommodation at Kara Cottage, Newlyn, was provided by Luxury Cornish Escapes, from £100 a night (sleeps two, three-night minimum. Train tickets were provided by CrossCountry (singles from Aberdeen to Penzance from £114 ). Or three really – as Agatha Christie once said: “To travel by train is to see nature and human beings, towns and churches and rivers, in fact, to see life.”

That night, having strolled along the coast back to my lodgings, I felt like I’d had two very different holidays in one. That evening at The Vault, a swish pop-up restaurant in Penzance, I undid all my exercise with rich dishes of padron peppers, wild mushroom arancini and basil tagliatelle accompanied by glasses of Abruzzian trebbiano and Puglian primitivo (the pop-up owners hold a national Restaurant Wine List of the Year award). After a night in a former fisherman’s cottage in Newlyn, I went for a misty morning walk in a T-shirt, through the bumpy countryside just outside the town and down into the fishing village of Mousehole. Stepping out at Penzance I was immediately struck by how much milder it was than in Aberdeen. After that, I pressed my face against the window to catch the beacon lights of remote farmhouses and the more gregarious illuminations of Exeter and Plymouth.

For much of the summer you can make this journey entirely in daylight, although on my trip, the wintertide gloaming dwindled into night between Cheltenham and Bristol. You can only get this snapshot of Britain from the vantage point of a train. After a night in a former fisherman’s cottage in Newlyn, I went for a gloriously misty morning walk Five roe deer, all striking precisely the same pose, watched the rattling, clattering carriages slide by. A geometric pattern of molehills revealed itself, created with the precision of a crop circle. A pair of gulls engaged in an aerial dogfight with a flock of rooks. Before long, with a rising sun blazing across a mirror-flat North Sea, I had drifted off into a state approaching zen. With a rising sun blazing across a mirror-flat North Sea, I drifted into a state approaching zenīut as I left, I found myself wondering: what exactly do you do on a train journey that lasts as long as Star Wars Episodes I-VI ? Though the wifi was surprisingly good, I chose to devote the hours not to screen-gazing but scene-grazing. It’s no wonder that, just before the pandemic struck, the Granite City leapt from 16th to eighth in the annual Bank of Scotland survey of Scotland’s best places to live. Afterwards I headed around the corner to the refurbished Siberia Hotel (doubles from £52 a night room only) to wallow in my en suite whirlpool bath. Also, one of my cocktails was on fire – a sure sign that one is winning at life. When evening came I ate at the lively Ninety-Nine Bar, whose current resident chefs – “how BAO now” – offer a good smattering of plant-based options, such as bao buns with smoky teriyaki tofu.

In Duthie Park’s free-to-enter David Welch Winter Gardens, the tropical house transported me to balmier climes. Having made my way to Aberdeen on less Herculean trains, I strolled along the city’s sandy beach on a bright, crisp day to the rows of cottages that make up Footdee (pronounced “Fittie” locally), once a discrete fishing village. And having been suspended for nearly two years because of the pandemic, the service is up and running again – albeit only on Saturdays for the time being.įishermen’s cottages in the village of Footdee, Aberdeen.

#Longest rail route in the world full#

The full journey is always made in that direction – for maintenance reasons, no service goes all the way north. After proceeding down the east coast as far as Newcastle, it heads south to York, then trundles south-west across the Midlands and on to Bristol, finally making its way to Penzance on the western tip of Cornwall via the south coast of Devon. Stopping at 35 stations along the way, it spends around two hours of the journey stationary as it picks up and drops off passengers. Over the next 13 hours and 19 minutes it travels 774 miles, the greatest distance covered by any train in Britain. However, everything else about this service is Brobdingnagian. There’s no great fanfare, no particular sense of occasion, and the train itself is only five coaches long. O nce a week, a train pulls out of Aberdeen station at 08.20 and heads south.