Rover ticket day 2/3

I'd struggled to pick 2 days that I could go out travelling within a week of my previous trip due to socials at Uni, so I decided to go out on a Sunday for a few hours before a social in the evening. Yes, I know, socials on a Sunday? The thing was, I've been a member of the UoN Salsa team over my time at uni and we were all going to one of the city's many salsa nights, which took place at a bar on a Sunday night every week. Another thing to bear in mind was I have been living in catered accommodation at uni for 3 years and I made the final decision to go out too late to order a packed brunch for the morning (we got breakfast and dinner in hall Mon-Fri with money to spend on our meal card to purchase lunches, whilst at the weekend we got brunch and dinner). This basically meant that I had between 11.30am and 6pm to leave my accommodation, go out on the trains, and get home to get changed for my social. I therefore planned to stay relatively local to Nottingham, and made this the Nottingham-Tamworth-Stoke-Derby-Nottingham day.

I went down to eat Brunch as early as I could (11am) and left my accommodation straight afterwards to head to the railway station. The first train of the day was heading for Cardiff Central via Birmingham new Street operated by CrossCountry. The limitations of my East Midlands 3 in 7 day Rover ticket didn't allow me to head into Birmingham itself, so I alighted at Tamworth, where I made my way down from the high-level platforms to the low level ones (which took me a minute to figure out where I was going).

I then boarded a London Northwestern Railway service to Stafford,before changing for another train to take me to Crewe via Stone.

On arrival at Stoke-on-Trent, I had a wait of approximately 35 minutes, so got a drink and sat in the waiting room. I must admit it's quite nice in there. I've sat in there on a previous occasion, when I had a 55 minute wait for a train having missed one by just 5 minutes on the way back from a Salsa Dance competition at Keele University a couple of years ago. Whilst it seemed to take a while for my drink to be made, I really enjoyed it. It was some sort of chocolate frappe if I remember correctly, full of sugar to keep me going until I met my friends at like 7.30pm.

From here, I simply boarded the train to Derby, where I changed for a CrossCountry service back to Nottingham. Unfortunately I don't have any pictures from this stretch of the journey as my phone battery ran out and I'd forgotten to take my portable charger with me, but it was a nice station. My connection at Derby was easy as well and I made it home without any issues. The phone battery issue I had on this day is a brilliant example of why, even if I'm sent an e-ticket as a pdf, I will always print a paper ticket off on journeys, albeit I hadn't ever actually used an e-ticket before around 7 months after this incident occured.

Stations visited: Blythe Bridge, Lichfield Trent Valley, Longton, Rugeley Trent Valley, Stafford, Stoke on Trent, Stone, Tamworth, Tutbury and Hatton and Uttoxeter.

Station Count: 164

I'll leave this here I think as the next day I travelled was most certainly on the longer side of things and to put the two trips together would make an exceptionally long day.