Summer adventures

Over the summer, I was working a lot so didn't have as much time as I'd have liked to have got out on the trains.

I did, however go on a few adventures. The first of these was the least noteworthy as it involved no new stations and was a trip to Brighton with friends. I did however get a rather nice picture of Brighton Station.

I did, however, take 2 trips which involved new stations to me. The first was a family trip to Milton Keynes, where we visited Bletchley Park. Whilst there were no new stations to me as far as London, we stopped at a number of stations north of the city, including Wolverton, where we visited a museum on the day we travelled up to Milton Keynes.

Stations visited: Apsley, Berkhamsted, Cheddington, Harrow and Wealdstone, Hemel Hempstead, Kings Langley, Leighton Buzzard, Milton Keynes Central, Tring and Wolverton.

I also found myself in Croydon one day, shopping with friends, and travelled home on a number of different services to tick off all of the stations between East Croydon and Horley. These were stations I'd not used on earlier trips as we tended to use the faster trains up to London.

My journey involved changing twice, once at Redhill and once at Horley, in order to tick off all of the stations that I wanted to, and took more than double the time of a fast train home from Croydon, but it was quite nice to stop at stations that I never really travelled through. The Brighton Mainline splits north of Horley into 2 pairs of tracks - a fast pair and a slow pair - meaning that I often didn't even pass through some of these smaller stations as the trains I usually used simply passed through without stopping.

Stations visited: Coulsdon South, Earlswood, Horley, Merstham, Purley, Purley Oaks, Redhill, Salfords, South Croydon and Three Bridges.

I've also noticed a mistake in my stations count on here, where somewhere I've written down a station and not added it up correctly - my spreadsheet shows 206 stations complete not 205, which it would be with the 20 new stations mentioned in this post. I've checked and all stations mentioned on my spreadsheet are accounted for on my blog, so have added the extra one on here to ensure that my spreadsheet balances correctly.

Station Count: 206

From here, we jump forward to the very beginning of 2020, but that's a story for another time!