![Hebden Bridge train station](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/travel/2024/07/09/TELEMMGLPICT000384962048_17205422909750_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqpVlberWd9EgFPZtcLiMQf0Rf_Wk3V23H2268P_XkPxc.jpeg?imwidth=680)
I’ve visited more than 400 British railway stations and these are the best (and worst)
As a non-driver and travel journalist, I’ve spent a staggering amount of time riding the rails – here are my highs and lows
![Hebden Bridge train station](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/travel/2024/07/09/TELEMMGLPICT000384962048_17205422909750_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqpVlberWd9EgFPZtcLiMQf0Rf_Wk3V23H2268P_XkPxc.jpeg?imwidth=680)
Since the first time I travelled on a train without a parent in tow (I was 14 and, clearly seeking the high life, went with two mates to Wigan to watch my football team Wrexham), I’ve seen the end of cigarette smoking on platforms, the demise of slam-door trains and the dreaded Pacer carriages, the influx of chain coffee shops and the “innovation” of ticket barriers.
Thirty years on from that maiden trip (the loco was late and the ticket office at Chester, where we changed trains, was a Portakabin), I’ve sauntered, waited, drank and even slept in at least 400 UK train stations as a visually impaired non-driver and travel journalist. In that time, much has changed and much has stayed, with almost heroic stubbornness, exactly the same. Here’s my take on the finest and the most desperate places in Britain to wait for your delayed 1046 service where, if you’re lucky, “there will be no trolley service today.”
The five I like the most
Hebden Bridge
If any train reveries you have are regularly interspersed with images from the era of Philip Larkin’s Whitsun Weddings, then Hebden Bridge delivers.
“All windows down, all cushions hot, all sense. Of being in a hurry gone,” the Bard of Hull wrote. And, despite being firmly in Ted Hughes country, the station has embraced these lines and resisted modernity with exquisite resilience. The station signs are all still written in white sans serif on black backgrounds, there’s a lamp room, signal box, hanging baskets and original globe lights.
The only issue comes when you realise that, as you’re not wearing a trilby, reading the Daily Sketch and smoking a Park Drive cigarette, you’re spoiling the ambience.
London Marylebone
![London Marylebone Railway Station seen from the front](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/travel/2024/07/09/TELEMMGLPICT000384962273_17205423797340_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqpVlberWd9EgFPZtcLiMQf0Rf_Wk3V23H2268P_XkPxc.jpeg?imwidth=350)
The capital’s most civilised mainline station hasn’t changed all that much since the Beatles ran through it at the start of A Hard Day’s Night over six decades ago.
Feeling more like the alighting point for a stoutly pretty market town in Shropshire, the hanging baskets and easy access to the six platforms make for a delightfully unhurried experience – though it’s only of use if you’re travelling to Oxford, Birmingham or the Chilterns.
Marylebone is also home to one of London’s best railway hotels in the form of the old Grand Central Hotel, now The Landmark, with a glass-roofed courtyard winter garden replete with palm trees, balustrades and the sound of clinking champagne glasses.
Cromford
![Platform at Cromford Station](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/travel/2024/07/09/TELEMMGLPICT000384962389_17205425384950_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqA7N2CxnJWnYI3tCbVBgu9T0aesusvN1TE7a0ddd_esI.jpeg?imwidth=350)
A couple of miles from Matlock Bath, the Derbyshire seaside-themed town that’s actually 70 miles from the nearest coastline, Cromford station eschews such ersatz novelties in favour of being perhaps the UK’s quintessential rural train station.
There’s usually only one train an hour from here, though you won’t care a jot if you have to wait 59 minutes for the next one; such is the bucolic air.
This is somewhere to read a chapter of William Makepeace Thackeray (rather than scribble through a sudoku) while you gaze at the verdant woods of the Derwent Valley and think about hiring out the old stationmaster’s house on the far (now disused) platform. It’s a gabled curio that once appeared on the sleeve of an Oasis single and is now a self-catering cottage.
Wemyss Bay
![Beautiful glass roofed interior of Wemyss Bay train station](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/travel/2024/07/09/TELEMMGLPICT000384962513_17205426050380_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqpVlberWd9EgFPZtcLiMQf0Rf_Wk3V23H2268P_XkPxc.jpeg?imwidth=350)
It’s worth making the journey to Wemyss Bay, from where ferries chug over to the Isle of Bute, just to alight at this monumentally beautiful station. Built in 1903, it was designed to get passengers and their luggage off the train and onto the vessel without exposing them to an excess of the hoolie winds that blow in from the Firth.
The result is a masterpiece of glass and ironwork, meshing multiple architectural styles, that feels both forensically thought out and yet effortlessly graceful.
Furthermore, right across from the mock-Tudor entrance sits McCaskies, one of Scotland’s finest butchers and bakers with an airy cafe next door serving up sublime haggis, pies, tattie scones and steak rounds for you to eat in or take on the ferry as it churns over to the island.
Pitlochry
![Pilotchry platforms](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/travel/2024/07/09/TELEMMGLPICT000384962638_17205426726490_trans_NvBQzQNjv4Bq-MzqwfpAMMp9lvzXOsacKEvejPBwjhnY6oeb0BOr7Wo.jpeg?imwidth=350)
Perhaps the most fabulous experience in British train travel is to be awoken in your cabin on the Caledonian Sleeper to Inverness at around 6am by a gentle knock on your door, and then be handed a tray bearing a bacon roll and a steaming mug of coffee.
After opening your window blind, you can sip your brew in bed, watch the Scottish Highlands rolling past, glens, dark woods, shimmering mist, broken only, now and again, by fleeting glimpses of tiny stations like Pitlochry.
Make a request to get off here and you’ll be rewarded (in summer at least) with the feeling that you’ve just stepped into a John Buchan novel.
Before you step off and follow the path of the River Tummel or ascend onto those brooding peaks, take a moment to browse the exceptional bookshop now housed in one of the station buildings, and to admire the whisky barrel shaped into a loco outside.
Then take a deep breath; this is the town that attracted 19th-century valetudinarians thanks to Queen Victoria’s doctor, who proclaimed the air in these parts to be especially unimpaired.
The five I like the least
London Euston
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“Run, my God, run, now, now now.” This is the premonitory mantra that will coarse through your mind as you and several hundred other people who didn’t book their tickets nine months in advance, slide over the lethally slippery floor of Euston station concourse when that gnomic Tannoy voice announces that your train will be departing in around six minutes time from the platform that is always the farthest away from where you’re stood.
As pensioners, children and foreign exchange students not versed in this sui generis London ritual, scatter to the four winds, you and your massed panting brethren will end up in one of the downward sloping “holding pens” that lead to the platforms, where your path to the train will be blocked by a team of ticketing staff.
While the trundle suitcases of other travellers career over your feet, your ticket will be scrutinised in a forensic manner. Eventually, with great reluctance, you will be permitted to board your train. But you won’t get your breath back, or your blood pressure normalised, until you’re well north of Milton Keynes.
Warrington Bank Quay
![Warrington Bank Quay Railway Station](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/travel/2024/07/09/TELEMMGLPICT000384963205_17205432116710_trans_NvBQzQNjv4Bq5dd29MwfFMR1mtnyLmH6GmuT-RD8RsYMxMpJRtmVdl4.jpeg?imwidth=350)
Fans of Terry Gilliam’s dystopian masterpiece Brazil will find much to enjoy in the hellish industrial view from the platforms at Warrington Bank Quay. It might swell Le Corbusier’s heart, but makes us commuters merely hanker for a strong drink.
Your view on one side will be entirely dominated by the disused Unilever detergent factory; an oleaginous mire of tubes, towers and windowless edifices. The view from the other side of the platforms is a car park and a grim row of Victorian terraced houses.
You’d better get used to looking at both the factory and the houses; a whopping 67 per cent of trains heading here were delayed over the last three months.
Chester
![Chester station](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/travel/2024/07/09/TELEMMGLPICT000384963207_17205432786100_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqdiNG1VWsy0E4JkQp1u04w7c_02QokmPMl3eLabfstKk.jpeg?imwidth=350)
If St Pancras is the wedding cake of 19th-century train station architecture, then Chester station is a two-day-old Gregg’s pasty that’s been pecked at by pigeons.
The featureless, flat station frontage is a mid-Victorian calumny, insanely lengthy on both sides of the entrance until it turns into goods yards and a tattoo parlour.
Stroll down the main drag that sprawls out ahead of the station entrance however, and you’ll quickly discover that, far from being deposited in Chester’s historic centre, you’re actually a good mile away at the end of a windswept and unappealing road. A strong shout for the dullest mid-sized station in England.
Sunderland
![Underground waiting room at Sunderland railway station](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/travel/2024/07/09/TELEMMGLPICT000384963402_17205434421900_trans_NvBQzQNjv4Bq5AKy6kltchdyQ3tVtY_32cUEENHXMpq1zmpOChFG3QQ.jpeg?imwidth=350)
This is the train station that will give you the clearest possible idea of what it might be like to live an alternative life as a troglodyte. All the platforms are entirely underground thanks to the sterling work of British Rail architects who decided to deck over the previous incarnation of the station in the mid 1960s.
To great fanfare, a new station entrance and waiting room was unveiled a few months ago which, in a daring piece of innovation, was placed at ground level so it could contain such modern fripperies as windows.
The new structure, however, has an interior like an abandoned Amazon warehouse, minus the goods – save for a couple of miniscule rows of sadistically uncomfortable chairs. A solecism of a station with the soul and flamboyance of a wet carrier bag.
Darlington
![Darlington railway station seen from inside the platform](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/travel/2024/07/09/TELEMMGLPICT000384963490_17205421085000_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqpVlberWd9EgFPZtcLiMQf0Rf_Wk3V23H2268P_XkPxc.jpeg?imwidth=350)
OK, so this is where the whole railway story begins, with George Stephenson’s Locomotion travelling between here and Stockton 200 years ago. And it’s hard not to be impressed by Darlington’s epic roof and magnificent platform clock.
But the winds that rage through the station mean it’s always so bitterly cold. This is a station where pigeons are regularly seen wearing Gore-Tex, where piping hot coffee turns to ice in styrofoam cups.