Due to the ongoing works at Rugby, there were no direct services at all to London from Manchester on Sunday, making a normally simple journey a little more fun-packed than usual. The offered routing was via Sheffield, heading into London on the midland line into St Pancras. Before this was a local train to Sheffield, departing Piccadilly at the ungracious hour of 07:45. The train was the usual Sunday morning special, full of crashed-out clubbers, plus assorted people doing the same London routing as myself.
I was looking at the station list for the service at Piccadilly, and it clearly was a local train, stopping at a large number of small-sounding places, but the major issue only became apparent when the train turned up – it was a Pacer, which I have so far managed to avoid the, uh, pleasure of. They are as horrible and bus-like as I’d been led to expect, but the full nastiness of the single-axle, non-articulated design was brought home going over some joined track where there was a pronounced longitudinal rocking. This is not a pleasant experience on a train. Oh, and traversing one set of points, there was some equally disturbing lateral sway. ((Apparently they are nicknamed ‘nodding donkeys’ by some))
All of the above was more than made up for, however, by the stunning route, which was completely unknown to me ((except that we passed through Marple, which I’ve been through on a canal trip)). The landscape is beautiful, with some long tunnels, impressive views all the time, and a very rapid arrival into Sheffield from a seemingly rural landscape.
