Barrow-in-Furness; Saturday, 27 June, 2015

A late start, though early enough to avoid the massive rush for the end of breakfast, and then out of the hotel and back over to Piccadilly station to catch the train north, firstly to Lancaster to change onto a Barrow train.

Everything appeared to be fine until we ground to a halt approaching Wigan. By the time we pulled into Preston station we were already 15 minutes late – which given I only had a 9 minute connection – was concerning, though that concern soon ceased to matter when it was announced that due to issues with the overhead cables near the Scottish border nothing would be moving for the foreseeable future.

In the end we were only held at Preston for 30 minutes, and so finally arrive into Lancaster 45 minutes late and long after my booked train had gone. Thankfully, as the trains were in such a mess ticket acceptance was in place and therefore I could use another operators slightly slower service that left about 25 minutes later.

My original plan was to head down to the hotel, check-in, drop off my luggage and then head back to the station to get the 14:50 departure north up towards Ravenglass. Unfortunately, thanks to the delay I was arriving into Barrow on the train that was the 14:50 departure and so was clearly not going to be able to keep to the original plan.

However, there is a reasonable service on a Saturday, Barrow is a very flat town, and the walk to the hotel was considerably reduced thanks to the cut-through of a Tesco Extra car park and retail estate. 60 minutes after arriving into Barrow I was checked in and on the next train heading north up the coast.

My stop for the afternoon was Ravenglass a town on the Cumbrian coast at the meeting point of three rivers just before they empty into the North sea and a village with a history that goes back to the Roman times when it had a large fort. Into modern times a small narrow gauge railway was built to shuttle iron ore from the mines down to the railway here. The mine line closed in the early part of the 20th Century, but in an early case of heritagisation the line was converted into a tourist attraction and re-opened to passengers in 1915.

As it was quite late in the day there was only one round trip left so I took that up the line to the town of Boot up in the fells, before heading straight back on the last train of the day to Ravenglass.

Back in Ravenglass I visited the remains of a former Roman Bath house, at one point attached to the large fort – most of which has been lost to the sea. The remains of the Bath house whilst not substantial are quite impressive for their height and for the amount of original Roman rendering and plaster that still remains on them.

Having looked around the remains I wandered back to the station and picked up the last mainline train of the weekend (no Sunday service and nothing north of Millom or south of Whitehaven after 8pm any day of the week) back into Barrow.

After a quick stop to get some cash out I headed back to the hotel and popped into the neighbouring restaurant for dinner before turning in for the night.