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Title : The Ineffectual Train
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The Ineffectual Train
The Ineffectual Train departs Derby for St Pancras every weekday at 16:36. Staff will beg you not to catch it. Hang around and catch the five o'clock, they plead (and even the next train after that arrives earlier too). The Ineffectual Train takes almost three hours to reach London, whereas direct services can speed you there in half the time. But I booked onto the Ineffectual Train because it's really cheap - if you book in advance you can ride all 145 miles for six quid. And I also booked because it takes a rare diversion over Britain's longest masonry viaduct, a track-bashing treat enjoyed by only four trains a day, and one of the finest sights in all of Rutland.The Ineffectual Train heads south to East Midlands Parkway, the outpost station dominated by eight cooling towers, then dodges Leicester by swinging east onto the line to Melton Mowbray. When Adrian Mole described the pastoral landscape in the title of his book Lo! The Flat Hills Of My Homeland, he was not wrong. The next stop is Oakham, county town of Rutland, beyond which a brief glimpse of the county's mega-reservoir can be seen. And then at Manton Junction the Ineffectual Train veers off onto its special stretch of track for twelve minutes that nobody else gets, including the Welland Viaduct.
The line dates back to the late 1870s when the Midland Railway sought to create an alternative route down towards London. The broad valley of the River Welland provided an expensive challenge, but an army of navvies moved in and constructed a low brick crossing in two years flat. The Welland Viaduct is just over a kilometre long and supported on 82 arches, and has been a bit of a nightmare to maintain over the years. It's also never more than 18 metres high, and straight, so alas the one place you can't see the appealing regularity of the structure is from a train. Best go stand next to it, or grab a drone, but I can at least say I've been over the top.
The Ineffectual Train wasn't busy on my journey south, but a music student nipped on at Oakham and sat opposite. Unfortunately the lady with the trolley shuffled up just as we approached the viaduct and sold him a bottle of water, and then because that didn't meet the minimum contactless threshold sold him a packet of crisps too. This meant that my view to the left was of a rack of snacks, cans and bottles, rather than whatever the upstream valley actually looks like. So I made do with the view to the right, a patchwork fields grazed by sheep and post-harvest furrows, with a seemingly insignificant stream wiggling briefly underneath. Atmospheric, but nothing to rush for.
Past what was once Harringworth station, and after a rather long tunnel, the Ineffectual Train swiftly reaches Corby. And here it sits for ten minutes before metamorphosing into just another hourly train to London, like those which have been shuttling south since 2009. But the real misery comes at Kettering, where the Ineffectual Train lingers for 23 minutes so that yet another train from Derby can overtake. Go catch that one, pleads the train guard, it'll get you into London 23 minutes quicker. That is unless you've got an advance ticket for the Ineffectual Train, in which case you're trapped, and we'll limp into St Pancras later. Best not.
Passenger trains across the Welland Viaduct (Mon-Fri only)
0600 Melton Mowbray → London St Pancras
0926 Corby → Melton Mowbray
1636 Derby → London St Pancras
1800 London St Pancras → Melton Mowbray
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