All Line Rover trip Day 10: Blackpool, Sheffield & Nottingham

In September 2022, I travelled around Britain for a week and a half using an All Line Rover train ticket. This is the last of eleven special posts giving a day-by-day narration of my trip. I also wrote an introduction to the trip, discussing my plans and goals, before I left; and will follow up my day-by-day narration with standard posts about the nineteen individual map areas I visited on the trip which are new to the blog. [1]

This post covers what I did on Monday 26th September 2022.

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Interactive map

Here’s an interactive map of my All Line Rover trip! By default, all 11 days of my trip are shown: press the icon in the top left to see the route for individual days of the trip only.

Key to colours: Purple = train, dark blue = metro/underground, pink = tram, green = bus, orange = walking, medium blue = ferry

Day 10: Blackpool, Sheffield & Nottingham

After my rest day around Haltwhistle on Sunday, my final day of the trip would be a long and busy one, as not only would I be making my way back home to Cambridge, but I had a lot of ideas for stops I could make on the way!

I started out my day by travelling to Blackpool, changing trains at Carlisle and Preston on the way. Blackpool has long felt like a notable entry on the list of English towns I’ve never visited. There are two rail routes into Blackpool, both heading west from Preston, but splitting into a kind of circle, with one heading around to the south, to enter Blackpool from the south and terminate at Blackpool South station, while the other does a kind of mirror image and heads to Blackpool North, at the other end of the town centre.

I arrived on the southern route, and got off one stop short of the terminus at Blackpool Pleasure Beach, and walked past the theme park of the same name for a couple of minutes to the extremely windy seafront, to get on a tram heading northwards.

Blackpool has a single tram line running along the coast for over 10 miles, and is noable for being Britain’s only tram system that’s stayed open from the initial heyday of trams, surviving the closures of the 50s and operating continuously to the revival of modern trams from the 80s onwards.

Blackpool is of course the most famous of the old seaside resort towns, and like all of them has significantly withered since its heyday, suffering at the hands of cheap international holidays. However, clearly Blackpool has enough cachet remaining to still attract fair numbers; the theme park is still going, as are the three piers, hundreds of fish and chip ships and the like!

I rode the tram for a couple of miles, getting off at the far end of the town centre, where I walked to the end of the North Pier. I was suprised to find there was no beach in the town centre, or at least that the beach is covered at high tide – I thought of Blackpool as a beachy place, but I suppose it’s probably just a little further along the coast.

After that, I had a brief wander around town, before heading into Blackpool North station to get the train on towards Manchester, this time by the other route out of Blackpool. Here I got my only real taste of train problems on this trip, as there was some issue meaning that several trains heading out of Blackpool were cancelled, and the station was filled with a crowd of disgruntled travellers. Still, though, I got on a train within twenty minutes or so, and my journey to Manchester was without further incident, just having to change on extra time at Preston.

I’d already visited Manchester on this trip, so wasn’t here to explore; instead I just popped out of Piccadilly station for some lunch. I ate in the somewhat oddly-named (and extremely bright green) Vegan Shack, following a recommendation someone given when I posted about my forthcoming trip on rail forums – it was indeed nice! The inclusion of potato tots on their menu led me to a Wikipedia-scroll while I was eating, where I discovered the existence of the American foodstuff “Hotdish“. Apparently there’s a lot of variation, but Wikipedia says a classic example is savoury beef mince topped with potato tots and canned condensed cream of mushroom soup, which sounds disturbing and oddly appealing at the same time, like a chaotic industrialised version of a shepherd’s pie.

For the rest of the day, I had a couple of ideas. With Blackpool, I’d now visited all but two of the UK’s metro and tram systems – I’d done the London underground and Croydon trams, Birmingham’s trams, Merseyrail, Manchester Metrolink, the Glasgow Subway, Tyne and Wear Metro and now Blackpool’s trams. Only Sheffield’s and Nottingham’s trams remained, and it’d be very realistic to go on both on my way home to Cambridge. However, on the trip so far, some of my favourite moments had been the country walks I’d managed to get in, and I’d need to pass back through the Peak District on my way home – I could get off the Hope Valley Line for a walk at Edale or somewhere like that, or get the train to Buxton, bus to Matlock, stopping off on the way for a walk, and train from Matlock on to Derby to continue homewards.

If I was willing to finish late enough, I could even conceivably do all of that, but in the end I decided I’d go with the tram option. I therefore got on the train to Sheffield, watching the hills temptingly pass the windows as we ran non-stop through the Peak District. This was part of the East Midlands Railway service from Liverpool to Norwich, which has always seemed like a bit of an odd one to me, running slowly across the whole width of the country via a very roundabout route with several reversals. It does, though, provide some vital connections: I can’t remember where, but I’ve seen some diagram with all of Britain’s biggest cities arranged in a circle, with arcs connecting cities wherever there’s a direct train service, to highlight pairs that have no such – and this one slow hourly service, with quite short rickety trains, was picking up a lot of the connections! With this current trip, I’d now been on the whole of the route as far as Ely: Liverpool to Manchester earlier on this holiday, Manchester to Sheffield now, and Sheffield to Ely on the way home to Cambridge from a trip to the Peak District a couple of months earlier.

Arriving in Sheffield, I had a brief wander through the town centre. I’ve been to Sheffield before, but didn’t remember it particularly well, it was nice! I really enjoyed running across the Winter Garden, a kind of indoor arboretum inside a striking arched wood and glass building.

After my walk, I got on a tram at City Hall, heading a few miles out of the city centre to the suburb of Attercliffe. I have to say, while my tram journey was good, Sheffield’s rather boxy trams are in my opinion the least pretty of the trams currently operating in Britain. There’s just something less sleek about them than, say, the Blackpool ones above, though Sheffield’s tram-trains are marginally better.

From Attercliffe, I walked the twenty minutes or so to Darnall station, in the suburb of the same name, there to catch the hourly train service heading from Sheffield out towards Lincoln. Darnall station was South Yorkshire’s least used station in 2019-20, with only about thirty users per day, which is extremely low for an urban station. I expect this is probably dreven by the infrequent service compared to the nearby buses and trams, but it probably doesn’t help that the station is hidden away behind some terraced houses and is, unfortunately, pretty grim: there was rubbish and graffiti everywhere. My obstacle for the day was passing through a group enjoying some cannabis in the narrow subway to access the far platform. Oh well!

From Darnall, I got the train in the Lincoln direction as far as Worksop, where I changed onto the Robin Hood Line southwards, and got off a few miles north of Nottingham at Bulwell, a station that’s also a stop on Nottingham’s tram system. The trams out to the north share the route of the train line, with one track for each, so the train and tram platforms are adjacent here, which is fun.

I got the tram into the city centre, thereby completing all of Britain’s tram and metro systems on this trip! Honestly I think Nottingham’s trams are my favourite of the trams I’ve been on. As well as just being generally nice-looking and clean inside and out, I enjoyed the section just north of the city centre where the north- and southbound tracks take different routes along some narrower suburban streets, very normal non-posh streets with lots of kebab shops, slightly tired-looking hairdressers and the like. I feel like the trams I’ve been on so far tend to either be street-running in fairly polished city-centre districts, and in segregated off-road tracks, usually on a former rail route, when further out, so you rarely get them on the street just in normal-seeming areas where people might live. So I enjoyed that.

In the city centre, I had a short wander around – again, it was pretty nice, though I think I’m realising on this trip that few city centres are nasty – before heading to the train station.

My final two trains of the day were an East Midlands Railway service to Ely – that same Liverpool to Nottingham service again – and finally a Great Northern service to my home station Cambridge North.

And that was it – after 10 days and over 1300 miles, I was done with my All Line Rover trip!

Reviewing the trip

This trip was great, I’m really glad I did it! When I posted about planning this trip, I listed the following goals:

• Firstly and by far most importantly, to have a good time travelling around on trains, and get to see some interesting new places!
• Strike a good balance between exploring, travelling, and not being too tired.
• Spend time both in cities and in isolated countryside, and see some nice scenic rail routes.
• Have time for a few shortish scenic walks when I’m in the countryside.
• Try out some of our few tram systems and metros.
• Ideally not to do much travelling back on myself to keep things from getting monotonous, i.e. not travel the same line twice very much.

I think those all went very well! It was a very busy trip, with much more activity per day than my typical holidays, but I enjoyed it, and I’m glad I learnt that busier trips can work well for me. I certainly don’t plan to make all my trips like this in future, but maybe a few more!

I enjoyed getting to see such a wide variety of places, and I think I did the cities & countryside split nicely. I’m also glad I got to see a lot of less-visited cities – Hull, Middlesbrough, Sunderland – and found there was plenty to appreciate there too. I probably did a bit more walking than envisioned, with some great walks near Dartmoor, Glossop, the Yorkshire Dales, and Flamborough Head, which were some of the best bits of the trip – I’d never done a walking holiday on my own, but I now wanted to.

The flexibility of being able to travel at any time on the All Line Rover ticket was great. I probably won’t do another ALR trip specifically anytime soon; they are very expensive and it’s possible to do some great exploring more cheaply with regional rovers and so on. But another moving-every-day trip via public transport is very much on the cards. I had a great time!

Footnotes

[1] The individual map area posts will duplicate the contents of the special trip posts, but unlike the latter they won’t form a continuous narrative, since they’ll skip things I did in map areas I’ve already posted about. They will, though, newly contain narration of anything I did on previous visits there – since some of these are areas which are new to the blog, but which I visited before starting my blog in 2017.