'You can walk virtually everywhere in England by using the train': the man connecting rail-based walks

[sl8]

Last edited Tue Apr 30, 2024, 04:41 PM - Edit history (1)

https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2024/apr/30/you-can-walk-virtually-everywhere-in-england-by-using-the-train-the-man-connecting-rail-based-walks

‘You can walk virtually everywhere in England by using the train’: the man connecting rail-based walks

A new website aims to offer a wide network of walking routes from British train stations, and is calling on hikers to add their favourites. Our writer accompanies the founder on a ramble to Bath Spa station

Ben Lerwill
Tue 30 Apr 2024 02.00 EDT

A British railway station can be many things. A place of tended flowers and toytown paintwork. A concourse of shuttered ticket booths and overpriced pasties. A terminus, a meeting spot, a gateway to escape. It can be heart-lifting or drab, bathed in birdsong or heaving with commuters. It can also be the starting point for a properly good walk.

National Rail serves 2,593 stations, their locations scattered across the map like cartographic confetti. Many of them sit directly on longstanding hiking trails or within a short distance of paths worth exploring. In a large number of cases, it’s possible to walk between two stations following rights of way, rendering a car or taxi redundant.

Such routes are frequently scenic but often little-known, giving value to the prospect of a dedicated database of station-to-station walks. Might a disembarkation at Ffairfach, Whatstandwell or Crianlarich be the passport to your next hike? Quite possibly – which is where the recently launched Railwalks.co.uk comes in. Its aim is to create a crowd-sourced national network of rail-based walking routes, mostly ranging from two to 20 miles.

“If you’d asked me 20 years ago how much of Britain you could walk through while using public transport, I would have imagined, like everyone else, not very much,” says founder Steve Melia, an academic, author and one-time Lib Dem parliamentary candidate who gave up flying in 2005 and driving in 2009. “I discovered that that’s not true. You can walk virtually everywhere in England by train – and bus, but mainly trains – and a lot of Wales and Scotland.”

[...]

Railwalks:
https://www.railwalks.co.uk/

[intrepidity]

1. I can walk anywhere using my car. nt

[sl8]

3. LOL. The title *is* a bit odd.

I'm assuming it was deliberate, but maybe not.

[Lonestarblue]

2. Public transportation in Europe is so convenient compared to the US.

We’d rather have gas-guzzling cars and huge parking lots everywhere so people don’t have to walk more than 20 whole steps to get to a store.

[Martin68]

4. Part of the point is that the public in the UK have a right to use walking trails that go through private land.