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‘You can walk virtually everywhere in England by using the train’: the man connecting rail-based walks
02.05.2024 - 14:59 / theguardian.com
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.”
I meet Steve near the station in the Wiltshire town of Bradford-on-Avon, from where we’re taking a nine-mile countryside walk to Bath Spa station. It’s one of the first truly fine days of spring, a breezeless morning of sunshine and plum blossom. Twenty four hours earlier we’d have got drenched, but today the skies are blue, the blackbirds are fluting and the dandelions are blinding. We head to the banks of the Kennet & Avon canal, bear west and begin.
Steve first had the idea for the website, which was unveiled in January in partnership with like-minded walking organisation Slow Ways, when he moved to Bristol in 2009 to teach transport and planning at the University of the West of England. “I started doing public transport-based walks each weekend,” he says, as the canal path leads us past narrowboats and banks of forget-me-nots. Waggy-tailed terriers zigzag the other way. “I like to walk somewhere different every time I go out, and the fact I was able to do that for 15 years and still find new routes made me think there was more to this than people realise.”
Soon we reach a path across open fields. A herd of friesian cows graze in the
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