As you’ll have read if you were following my Twitter feed, the last few hours of the challenge were a bit frantic, and in the end took on a different twist to what was intended.
The TransPennine Express service (Edinburgh-Preston) had picked up a ten-minute delay by Lancaster. That was not a problem, as long as it didn’t get worse. We were still ten down at Preston but that still left me with 17 minutes before the Birmingham train was due. But two minutes before arriving, that suddenly acquired a twelve-minute delay. Bad news…
A twelve-minute delay meant I would arrive at Birmingham with just three minutes to make the last train for Rugby. I spoke to the train manager and he eventually got an agreement that as they were both Virgin services, they would hold the Rugby train (the 23.10) until we arrived. It would only be a couple of minutes, as we expected to arrive at 23.10.
But as we approached Birmingham, it all changed. The 23.10 would not now be calling at Birmingham, it would be calling at Stafford, a station we had already passed. If this decision had been made earlier we could have changed trains there.
What we had to do was get to Birmingham, change there for a train to Tamworth and then change again for the train that we *should* have got at Brum, but went via Stafford instead. Got it? Good, I’ll be asking questions later.
This caused me a problem though. I had already covered the Tamworth-Rugby stretch in the morning. Under my ‘no backtracking’ rule, that meant that any miles I did after Tamworth wouldn’t count. This map from Wikipedia should help.
I’d followed the Trent Valley north from Rugby while on the Euston-Manchester service, branching off at Colwich Junction towards Stoke.
From Preston, I was coming south down the orange line. As you see, this goes through Birmingham, and continues via Coventry to Rugby. No backtracking, see!
But of course, we ended going across country via Water Orton, to Tamworth, and as you can also see, Tamworth is on the blue line…
I had checked the timetable on the Edinburgh-Preston leg, to take into account the mistake I made with Stockport, and had a total of 1360 miles. But now, I had to take off Brum to Rugby and add on Brum to Tamworth.
So, the total completed mileage was 1343 miles, covered in 23h 47m. I was disappointed at first, but on reflection, it’s still a damn fine effort I reckon!
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