Day 5: Bike? What bike?

We took breakfast in the hotel, and after arriving too late to get food the previous evening I took full advantage of the "all you can eat" breakfast buffet. Over breakfast I went through what I saw as the options for traveling home. The Aberdeen -> Bristol Parkway service runs only once a day, at 08:25 (but we had found out at the booking office at Inverness that the cycle spaces on that service were already reserved) so option one was to book that service, stay another night in Aberdeen and travel in the morning. The other option was to take a route involving various changes and chance the availability of bicycle spaces (potentially getting stuck at an intermediate point, but that isn't really any worse than staying put in Aberdeen).

After we had eaten our fill I headed off alone to the railway station to see about booking passage. It turned out that only one of the three spaced on the 08:25 service was still available, so with that ruled out I purchased tickets for travel to Bristol today. I then took a wander around Aberdeen, questing after some brown paper and parcel tape (as I had a feeling this would serve us well later). As I wandered the cobbled streets near the docks I encountered some beautiful medieval architecture (regrettably I had left my camera at the hotel). The detailed Gothic structures being far better appreciated by daylight than the dull light of street lamps (as we had seen them during our brief excursion around Aberdeen en route to Thurso).

The game plan for the railway was to head for Edinburgh initially and then Bristol or South Wales, probably via Birmingham.


The leg to Edinburgh was strait forward, comfortable and irritatingly beautiful. During both the rail journeys along the East coast the North Sea shore looked tantilisingly beautiful. The skies were clear and the sea was a deep blue, like a gem set within the strange shapes of the wave hewn land forms, and pastel colours of rural Scotland.


The firth of forth looked particularly attractive the charming stone construction of the small harbour, contrasted against the grand scale and industrial overtones of the Road and Rail bridges. I found the obscured view of the bridges from the railway to be disappointing. At this point most of all I felt a pang of regret at what this trip could have been.

During the course of the trip Rich has had a few "issues" with station ticket barriers. I thought though that headed homeward, with only a single ticket and having already made 6 visits to railway stations under his belt this trip he would have it down by now... but once I went through the ticket barrier at Edinburgh, were we were changing tain, I once again turned to a conspicuously empty space behind me. Eventually Rich found his way off the platform and joined me on the station concourse.
Edinburgh is a large station, with many of the platforms only accessible via bridge. We made our way to platform 11, laboriously detaching and reattaching bits of kit to our bikes to fit in the lift, were a service for Portsmouth Harbour (calling at Bristol Parkway) was shortly to depart. When we spoke to the guard we found that all of the cycle spaces were booked from Edinburgh, so we couldn't travel. We then spoke with a member of the station staff to try and find out the availability of spaces on the next (and last) service to Bristol.

Eventually the verdict came back; only one space was available. I ran into the two ladies who had booked the other two bike spaces. They were very pleasant and had strong (and rather scathing) views on the provision for cyclists on the railway. We lamented the demise of the guard's van in latter years and discussed the rules for the class of train we were to travel on.

The rules make it clear the the train will carry only three bicycles. Together the four of us implemented the cunning plot, which I had begun to hatch back in Aberdeen; we dismantled Rich's bike and rapped it in the brown paper that I had purchased. We were now traveling with three bicycles... and one parcel of bicycle components :-)


The bicycle space claims to be for two bikes. This seems to assume that everyone rides a BMX, because its almost impossible to get them in. Three of us spent about 10 minutes getting the bikes into their space. They only fit with one bike rear wheel up, and one bike rear wheel down (but there are no instructions, and this is not how the illustration showed it). It would have been nice if the cycle accommodation on these trains had been designed by someone who had seen a typical bicycle, rather than heard a vague description of one. (though they look fine in the picture, the issue is getting them through the aperture that leads into the storage bay, and doing the necessary turning around in the confines of the train car.


On the train.

The train journey from Edinburgh was the usual cramped and unpleasant affair that I've come to expect from these long haul routes, though we did manage to get seats from Newcastle. We rolled into Bristol parkway just after 22:30, leaving enough time for Rich to catch the last connection to Newport at 22:45.