What cemented all of this journey in the first place was that accidental booking of a seat reservation.
Even though Euston is only a few minutes on foot from Saint Pancras, I wouldn’t normally go through from there as it’s eye-wateringly expensive in first. Quite often, it’s just as easy to get a direct GWR service from Paddington to Hereford, which is my preferred route, or go via the tropics of Newport. However you do it, getting from London to Herefordshire will take about three hours door-to-door on the train.
However, armed with a first class Interrail pass and therefore not having to pay the sphincter-wrecking 271€ advance fare (for an hour and forty minutes), I decided I’d go the Avanti West Coast route because I also wanted to have time to enjoy a second go on the Transport for Wales Premium service I had last time.
But I am getting ahead of myself.
After a cloistery breakfast, I got the number four bus to Liège Guillemins from a stop just around the corner from the hostel. I had time to look at the station and take some photographs of pointy and swooshy, then opted to get on an earlier train to Bruxelles Midi from whence my Eurostar would whisk me to London and onward trains would chuff me closer to home.
The SNCB train had lovely big shiny seats in first class, which itself occupied the upper deck of what looked like an otherwise normal commuter service. I found myself an individual comfy seat at the back of the carriage and settled down for the hour-long trip to Brussels. There was not much scenery to take in, really, and on arrival in Brussels I wondered why I’d bothered to get the earlier train as Midi (or Zuid in Flemish) is a somewhat sterile and dystopian place in which to spend an hour or so waiting for a train. Not quite Montparnasse levels of grim, but general overall meh.
There some amenities — particularly if you want to buy jewelry, watches, or chocolate — but there’s nothing inviting one to actively while away the time by nursing a coffee or vin chaud until departure and I was forced to make do with a cardboard cup of coffee. Every cloud, however, and Midi’s silver lining over the Gare du Nord in Paris is that the check-in times are slightly shorter — I think it’s officially an hour — and security is quicker (it seems), but once the other side of security there’s even less to do unless you fancy a spot of duty-free shopping (chocolates).
With less frequent services from Brussels, the whole experience of getting through the station and onto a train felt a lot less frenzied, which was welcome.
Despite having paid only 38€ — rewarded with Club Eurostar points — for my Eurostar seat reservation in addition to the 55€ per-day cost of my pass, I still got the full Eurostar Plus experience. The meal was served before we’d even left the station, a necessity apparently so the train staff could get ready to serve another meal to passenges joining at Lille Europe, and my non-meaty option was a Feta and hummus salad, with sweet potato and “giant couscous”, which was followed by a sweet round brown thing that I couldn’t quite identify but which was nice anyway. This was served with a bread roll, some divine butter, and a bottle of rosé.
There were no coffee-making facilities to be had on this train, for some reason, although I learned from the lovely man serving us that the Eurostar Café had hot water if I wanted a teabag. I didn’t, but I did want the second bottle of wine he offered as penance, and then remembered that I had come equipped with an Aeropress, a coffee ginder, and a bag of coffee. I took great satisfaction in knowing that I would soon be the only person having a cup of coffee.
The couple in the seats behind me across the aisle had already got my hackles tingling with anticipation of going up because he, a loud gentlemen of the geezer persuasion, had spent most of the time on the phone talking about this and effing that and then had the audacity to book tickets for the Stereophonics, an effing feat he had to tell his effing mates about from an effing Eurostar which he was effing on. Had I had my wits about me I’d have noted his credit card number on the second read and ordered a book from Amazon entitled “How to sit down and shut the fuck up on the train and other bleedingly fucking obvious stories of consideration for your fellow travellers”, but it appears not to be in print yet and I needed caffeine.
As I had already alienated the woman in the seat in front of me by politely showing her how to locate the little switch on the side of her iPhone that stopped it from going ping every few minutes, I thought it best to retire to a standing place directly behind Mr and Mrs to hand-grind my coffee; the repetitive low grating sound would have been covered temporarily by the sound of coffee being crushed and the resulting soothing aroma of freshly-ground coffee. Beans ground, it was time to get the final ingredient.
It is a long wobbly walk from coach 16 to coach 8 on the Eurostar, but I got there eventually. In the first Café Eurostar in coach 9, a particularly bristling man who I didn’t take to particularly tried to charge me 2,60€ for a cup of hot water, despite being told I’d been sent from above. I left him holding his cup of hot water when he demanded payment and tried my luck next door in coach 8, where the lovely smiley lady was far more obliging and sent me back on my precarious stagger to my seat in coach 16 proudly clutching a rather-warm-by-this-stage paper cup of what was soon to become a glorious dark suspension of (dis)relief.
I obtained a coffee cup from the nice man with the trolley and there then ensued a sketch where a particularly badly-timed train wobble led to me crawling around under the seat in front of Mr and Mrs Cockerney trying to retrieve the black filter holder of my Aeropress which had tried to make a run for freedom. Coffee was eventually served, and the man from the trolley looked particularly impressed as he came through again offering more wine.
Around the time we left the tunnel, Lady Effingthis decided it was acceptable to watch daytime television on her phone without headphones. I’d had three bottles of Eurostar rosé by this point so thought it sensible to saunter over to her seat to politely suggest that she turn it down. This was not as well received as I’d expected, and once I was back in my seat I heard Lord Effingthat opine in a brief moment of enlightenment that perhaps I’d like them to travel in effing silence. At last! After a brief bout of silence they seemed to notice that in fact the rest of the carriage was already travelling in effing silence and so the remaining travel time passed in glorious (effing) silence.
We pulled into Saint Pancras a few minutes late but I had left myself plenty of time to get to Euston and have a quick reconnaissance of the free stuff available in the first class lounge. I wasn’t sure whether I’d be allowed in — think Frankfurt Airport — but I asked the lady nicely if a first-class Interrail pass let me in and after a moment’s consideration she decided it did. She was very smiley and I reciprocated. It was a brief visit, but I managed some refreshment in my luxurious cosy cubicle. There is a bar serving some free refreshments but making you pay for others, and as I was only in there for a short time I had a little nibbly affair with a bottle of sparkly water, and made sure to smile at the lovely lady on the way out to catch my connecting train from, I think, platform 14.
The last time I travelled on an Avanti West Coast service was when I made a dash from Covid in 2021 and I remembering being impressed as I had a carriage and caterer to myself, but that was a cheap-ticket exception. I was therefore quite excited to climb onto the 15:02 to Crewe, only to find my seat table occupied by two more loud people of the phoning persuasion who, to be fair, were not aware they were in the wrong because the reservation lights were showing all seats as free. I grabbed an individual window seat and pre-emptively deployed the buds.
The couple across the aisle from me raised an eyebrow as the person in front of them answered another phone call about yada yada luggage.
Once under way it didn’t take long for the lady from the front of the train to come and check our tickets then ask whether we’d like any free stuff. The choices of free stuff were a Bombay potato and spinach salad, a pasta salad with mushroom and sweet potato, or cheese and biscuits. I originally thought I’d have the pasta, but changed my mind at the last minute and had the cheese and biscuits instead. They came nicely presented with a sun-dried tomato, chutney, and — I never thought I would be so excited by a vegetable in vinegar — a majestic, if solitary, pickled onion. Probably the best free stuff ever, I reckoned at this point. It was served with a dinky bottle of white in a proper glass.
Despite the devastation of storm Darragh, the UK trains were running surprisingly punctually, testament to the armies of workers tasked with clearing things to make sure finger puppets and their handlers were able to get to their destinations with little impediment. We ran slowly for a while between Euston and Stafford, but for the rest of the journey were whooshing along through the dark very comfortably until we arrived in Crewe only a few minutes late. It was a tight connection made tighter by a last-minute platform change due to a delayed Euston service monopolising platform six, but the 17:10 Transport for Wales service to Swansea glid into the station on its new platform on time and I boarded to find first class busy, but peaceful.
I had time to devour the TfW Christmas menu only with my eyes. There are three courses, and you can choose two or three of those for £21.95 or £24.95, and add a bottle of wine for £15 which is a little steep, though it doesn’t say how big a bottle of wine is. I took a picture of the menu.
Starters
- Handmade seasonal root vegetable soup
- Classic prawn cocktail
- Grilled goats cheese with beetroot chutney, peppered rocket and balsamic dressing.
Mains
- Welsh turkey parcel with all the trimmings
- Pan-seared salmon
- Nut-less roast
Desserts
- Traditional Christmas pudding
- Chocolate orange truffle torte
- A Welsh cheeseboard
This might actually warrant a journey somewhere on the train just to sit and eat.
It is said, so Neighbour told me, that the food offering on the Transport for Wales Premium service is considered some of, if not the, best on the whole UK rail network. Had I been thinking more clearly when booking tickets I would have booked from Euston to Manchester to then allow myself the full two hour experience; from Crewe I only had an hour and twenty minutes which left the dining choices a little limited.
I enjoyed my swimming pool-sized coffee and ordered a toasted sandwich to chomp on as we trundled south. I could have had soup with it but knew there was food waiting for me at the other end, so it would have been a waste. The seats, like last time, were absolutely massive and the at-seat service, food from a kitchen in the adjacent car where staff appeared to be actually cooking rather than reheating, was faultless. On the basis of this, I would probably go so far as to say that this last train was the best train experience of the whole trip.
We were a few minutes late pulling into Leominster where I alighted through the guard’s door as the posh trains are too long for the platforms. Were this my decision I’d have the peasants at the front leap — or be pushed — like lemmings onto the tracks, but it’s also possible TfW have calculated not many people in first feel the need to get off here or that my preferred detraining option might have health and safety considerations.
Neighbour was kindly waiting for me and was supremely indulgent in listening to my stories of seasonal puppetry and train travel.
Fin.
