Perpetual Change

Getting from Cheadle Hulme in Cheshire to Barrow-Upon-Soar in Leicestershire is not one of the easiest rail journeys to make. The ticket clerk at Cheadle Hulme hadn't even heard of Barrow Upon Soar, although it didn't help when I asked for a ticket to Barrow on Soar, which obviously wasn't programmed in the ticket machine

The journey involves no fewer than four trains, a local for one stop to Stockport, a Central Trains 'City Link' to Nottingham, then a MML Meridian to Loughborough, and finally another local one stop to the unstaffed halt at Barrow upon Soar.

The short hop from Nottingham to Loughborough was the first time I'd had the chance to travel in one of Midland Main Line's new class 222 "Meridians". These are derived from the class 220 Voyager, but with rather better interiors, with seating and general ambience resembling the classic Mk3. Unfortunately this was spoiled by noticeable vibration from the underfloor engines, worse than a Voyager, and far more intrusive than the 170 Turbostar on the Stockport-Nottingham leg. Don't know if this is typical, or there was a fault on car I rode in.

Amazingly, with eight trains and six changes in the outward and return journey, I didn't suffer a single missed connection. I did have one late-running train, the MML HST between Loughborough and Chesterfield on the way back, which lost 10-15 minutes because of a track circuit failure near Trent. But fortunately there was a 25 minute connection at Chesterfield.

Interesting loading levels on the trains. The Central Trains citylink train was a two car class 170s DMU, and was pretty full out of Stockport, although everyone managed to find a seat. I've travelled this way a lot, and it's often been busy on this route on a Saturday morning. Many people got off at Sheffield, but just as many boarded, and there were people standing when it reached Nottingham, where it terminated due to engineering work further east. It actually reached Nottingham in time for a slightly earlier train than the one I was making for. But the two car 170 bound for Birmingham was pretty crowded, so I decided to wait for the train I'd originally planned to catch, the MML London train. This one, the four car 222 was practically empty; as a semi-fast to London, it would probably pick up passengers en-route at places like Wellingborough and Kettering, and arrive at St Pancras with a decent loading.

The last leg of the journey, of just six minutes, was on the 'Ivanhoe Line', a new local service shuttling between Loughborough and Leicester, serving several intermediate communities who has lost their rail service in the Beeching cuts on the 1960s. Only about a dozen passengers boarded the two coach class 156 DMU at the start of it's journey, but I counted another eleven waiting at it's first stop, Barrow upon Soar.