OS Explorer map 286, Blackpool & Preston: Lytham St Anne’s & Leyland – I do not own this map and had not visited it before starting this blog. Visited for this post 26th September 2023.
I visited this map area as part of my All Line Rover trip in September 2022, travelling around Britain by train, for which I did day-by-day blog posts already, and am now going through doing my regular posts about the new map areas I visited. The main content below will therefore be just a lightly edited version of relevant parts from my post about Day 10 of the trip – for a more connected narrative I recommend taking a look there instead.
I arrived in this map area on the final day of my All Line Rover trip, coming from Haltwhistle, where I’d stayed the past two nights, via Carlisle to Preston, and changing trains once more there for Blackpool. 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 shops 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 an extra time at Preston before leaving this map area!
Visiting all the maps! 