London-Centricity

15/09/06 18:03 Filed in: Travel
I've recently travelled to Newcastle (on Tyne) and by train it is unbelievable that the link across the North Pennines is so slow. There are very few cross-Pennine routes and there is a lot of commonality between Carlisle and Newcastle that I'd expected the rail link to be better, faster and much more modern. There are lots of level crossings, small stations and no inter-city class trains. They also don't seem to arrange the timetables well to let people come off the West Coast trains to step onto this line. I spent about an hour each way at Carlisle station. It might have been a a little quicker to go up the east Coast line to Edinburgh and then get a West Coast train back down.

Also I've been looking at getting to Yeovil - I expected to go down maybe change at Bristol and get to Yeovil . The Trainline.com website directs you via London! It even forbids you to go to Exeter and work back. This is crazy - the trip time would be about 8 hours!

We should get grid rid of the hub and spoke model of the railways around London as the major hub.
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