The first delay...

The day after tackling Stafford, Stoke and Stone was my final travel day in that week, using my 3 in 7 day East Midlands Rover ticket. The plan was to go and try to hunt down a Pacer at Sheffield station, travelling there via Lincoln, and then travelling down to Leicester in order to pick up the Leicester-Nottingham stopping service before heading home. I had considered heading over towards Derby in order to try to pick up Spondon station after this, however as you will see, the day didn't quite go to plan.

So, what was the plan?

I had planned to be on a train from Nottingham to Lincoln almost as soon as the peak period had finished (forgive me, I can't remember the exact time!), where I would change for a service back over to Sheffield, stopping at all of the stations along the line which I hadn't done whilst heading for the Robin Hood line a few days earlier. At Sheffield, the plan was to obtain lunch (that burger king making its third appearance on my blog) before finding a pacer to travel on. I wasn't hugely fussed where the pacer went (provided it was within the validity of my rover ticket), I just wanted to travel on one before they were all retired and I knew that with going home from Uni for the summer, back to the south east, it was pretty much now or never. From there, I planned to get a EMT service down to Leicester, where I would change for the stopping service to Nottingham, calling at Beeston and Attenborough among other places. At Nottingham, I would look for a train to Spondon, however I was planning to travel through the station to Derby itself to enable me to change for any train coming back to Nottingham (I knew that not all Notts-Derby trains stopped at Spondon and had a committment that needed me to be on a bus out of the city centre by 6.45pm, having eaten if at all possible, so minimising the wait for this return journey was important).

This was also the last time I used East Midlands Trains before the franchise was taken over by East Midlands Railway over the summer. Another notable thing was that (according to wikipedia) this journey took place around the time that Lincoln Central Station became known as Lincoln. Signage at the stations showed the name as just Lincoln, whilst the train information referred to it as Lincoln Central.

Anyway, I made my way to Nottingham Station rather early in the morning (If I remember correctly, I was there by 9.15am, which considering it took me about 45 minutes to get from my student accommodation to the station meant a rather early start by student standards) in order to board my train to Lincoln. I had downloaded the National Rail app before I first used the trains to get home from Uni, 18 months earlier, and it came into its own on this journey, allowing me to look up platforms for trains between Lincoln and Sheffield before my inbound train arrived. This meant I was in and out of the station within under 10 minutes.

The journey across was rather uneventful, and I even managed to top up my phone battery on the stretch between Worksop and Sheffield, which I'd taken photos of during the trip I made the previous week. I decided that it was a bit early for lunch on arrival at Sheffield, so headed straight down to try and find a pacer. I was thrilled to discover that the first train to arrive at the platform I was at was a pacer, which I climbed aboard. If I remember correctly, it was heading towards Gainsborough Central, however I wasn't heading this far, instead changing at Doncaster to head back towards Sheffield. It was on the train back to Sheffield that I remembered that I had forgotten to tick off the stations between Worksop and Sheffield when I had passed through them the previous week, so I added them to the list for this day as I'd passed through them on the train from Lincoln that morning.

By the time I got back to Sheffield, I was getting hungry, so I decided to stop for lunch. Again, I headed for the trusty Burger King within the station, with the aim of being on the train bound for London St Pancras that was due to depart around 45 minutes later than I'd arrived at the station.


On this train, I ticked off Long Eaton, which I'd never stopped at previously, as well as stopping at a number of stations that I'd been to before such as Derby. At East Midlands Parkway, the train stopped for around 45 minutes due to a medical emergency with a patient in another carriage. I must commend the staff on the service for their professionalism throughout the situation. Unfortunately this delay meant that I missed the planned train out of Leicester, but I completely understand why the train had to stop and hope the passenger involved was okay. The delay meant that I had a wait of around half an hour for the train an hour later than I'd originally planned to get, giving me plenty of time to get a drink. It was rather cold and wet on this day so I sheltered within the cafe until I could see the unit arriving to take me back for Nottingham.

On my train back to Nottingham, I realised that I didn't have time to eat and make the return journey across to and from Derby via Spondon, so dropped this plan as I was going to have to head up to Matlock at some point so doing Spondon (as well as Peartree) at this later point seemed to make sense.

Therefore I simply headed up towards Nottingham, where I alighted from the train and went to find some dinner before I headed out to my evening activity, before arriving home at approximately 10pm, 14 hours after leaving in the morning.

Stations visited (including those I missed off the list last week): Attenborough, Barrow-upon-Soar, Beeston, Conisborough, Darnall, Doncaster, Gainsborough Lea Road, Kiveton Bridge, Kiveton Park, Lincoln (Central), Long Eaton, Meadowhall, Mexborough, Newark Castle, Retford, Rotherham Central, Saxilby, Swinton, Syston and Woodhouse.

Station count: 185

After this, it was a few weeks before I made it out on the rails again, so I think I'll leave this post here.