I feel like this might be an excessively long post, but it feels appropriate to group these trips together. 4 years ago, we traversed the country looking at Universities, trying to find the right one. We visited a LOT of universities: UCL, Nottingham, Cambridge, Portsmouth, Southampton, UEA, Imperial College London and Sussex. The two London unis actually involved no new stations for me, but the others did, so let's start with Nottingham, where I ended up.
As far as London, I didn't stop anywhere new, but we did on the train from London to Nottingham. I loved the Uni and can't quite believe my time there has ended quite this abruptly. I'm hoping to go back to visit the city in the autumn, depending on the coronavirus situation of course.
Anyway, the stations I remember visiting are: East Midlands Parkway, Leicester, Loughborough, Luton Airport Parkway and Nottingham. I know there were others, but most of the others are mentioned in other (future) posts.
And then Cambridge. This was a weird one travel wise. When we went to look on the open day, we got the fast train from Kings' Cross to Cambridge. I then did a summer school, where they organised our travel. For some obscure reason, they routed me into London Victoria (as usual) but then, rather than me getting on a train at Kings' Cross, they left me on the tube to Finsbury Park and put me on a stopping train from there to Cambridge. It was nice in a way though as we'd formed a group chat before we went, and many others from the summer schools programme came to join us in the carriage that we kind of ended up taking over. I'm not entirely sure whether I've missed a station or not but I'm sure to end up going back that way in the future (probably to visit Cambridge North).
Stations Visited: Alexandra Palace, Cambridge, Finsbury Park, Kings' Cross, Hitchin, Royston, Stevenage and Welwyn Garden City.
One thing I struggled with was fitting all the Universities that I wanted to look at without taking tons of time off school. One way we found to get around this issue was to do 2 Universities in a weekend - Portsmouth and Southampton. It was hard work, and I went back to School on Monday more tired than I'd left on Friday, but it was well worth it to decide that neither was the right University for me. Actually that's a bit harsh, the Universities were both lovely, it's just that the courses weren't quite what I wanted. Anyway, we got the train to Portsmouth and Southsea on the Saturday morning (missing out Portsmouth Harbour, which is a slightly annoying stub I'm going to have to come back to but never mind) to look around Portsmouth University on that day. Our hotel for the night was at Southampton Airport because there was a bus from there to Southampton University, so after finishing at Portsmouth we went back to Portsmouth and Southsea to travel to Southampton Airport Parkway via Eastleigh. On the Sunday morning, we were up early to get the bus into Southampton to look around the University; we then got another bus to Southampton Central station from where we boarded a train home.
Stations visited: Bosham, Cosham, Eastleigh, Emsworth, Fishbourne, Fratton, Havant, Porchester, Portsmouth and Southampton, Southampton Airport Parkway, Southampton Central, Southbourne and Warblington.
The summer holidays came and went and on the first weekend of the new academic year, we travelled up to Norwich, to look at the University of East Anglia.
Again, as far as London we used Thameslink, stopping at stations I've already mentioned, but we alighted the train at Farringdon to get the tube to Liverpool Street for the train to Norwich. I did this in a day a few months later and I can tell you it was exhausting - a 16.5 hour day due to disruption (I think it was a signal failure or something) on the way home from London.
Stations visited: Colchester, Diss, Fanrringdon, Ipswich, Liverpool Street, Manningtree and Norwich.
And the final section, but by no means the least important, was the trip to one of my local Universities, Sussex. In the end I decided against going there as the course wasn't quite what I wanted, but I loved the uni and if the course had been right I may have stayed much closer to home!
I'd already stopped at all the stations en route to Brighton, so only ticked off 3 more: London Road (Brighton), Moulsecoomb and Falmer.
Anyway, I think I'll leave this here for now as we are about to jump forward a couple of years.
Station count: 86
No comments:
Post a Comment