Tour summary

 The UK Rail Tour was largely successful but not without three detours, several cancelations and a couple of planning errors.

A few Stats:

The original plan was to cover 2255 miles in 56hrs 16min travel plus 33hr 8min waiting for connections. There were to be 16 first-class trains and 39 standard of which 11 would have onboard food.

What actually happened was 2139 miles in 54hrs 26min travel plus 34hr 37min waiting for connections.

That included 20 first-class trains and 33 standard of which only 1 actually had onboard food. 

I must add that for the three days of excessive heat most stations and trains had free bottles of water and I saw no evidence at all of any tickets being inspected. All stations with automatic barriers had them all locked open.

I had a two-week first-class Rail Rover to cover my entire tour at a total cost of £825 with a Senior Railcard. If I'd had a standard-class Rail Rover and paid the extra for the first-class journeys it would have cost £210 more.

The travelling works out at 39p/ml.

My budget for dinner bed & breakfast for 13 nights was £1730 but it worked out at £1670.

By far the most expensive hotels were those in Scotland, at £149 (Glasgow) and £156.50 (Inverness) per night B&B. So the most expensive hotel was the worst hotel!  In August these rise by £25 and £40 per night!
My favourites were (not in order):
Royal, Weymouth (£114) - view, speed of service
Prince Rupert, Shrewsbury (£95) - breakfast
Red Lion, Doncaster (£74) - the room, menu prices

I also had a budget of £490 for lunches, drinks and other extras but only spent £140, and that includes the new suitcase at Doncaster!

Absolutely everything was paid by card, I didn't use any cash at all.

Next?:

This seems to be the question everyone is asking.  During the tour I was planning to do it again: properly. By that I mean to cover the entire tour without detours, correcting the interchanges at Moorfields and Highbury.  This is still uppermost in mind.

Another possibility, before a rerun of the complete tour, is to re-do the parts of the route that went wrong (Yeovil-Exeter-Taunton, Moorfields, Kilmarnock-Troon, Newcastle-Thornaby-York-Seamer-Hull-Doncaster, Highbury & Islington) taking the quickest route in between them. This should be possible in a week.  After that I'd be better placed to do the whole tour.

Yet another is to string together a number of journeys where I always travel to wherever each train terminates, or maybe from where each train starts, or both!

I'll certainly do something similar next year but don't have the confidence to do it in Europe.

Any ideas???

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