On Friday 18 July, we attempted one of our quirkiest challenges yet… to play on all the platform 0s at UK railway stations in a day!
When we came up with this idea a few months ago, we found out there were nine such platforms - at Edinburgh Haymarket, Leeds, Doncaster, Stockport, Cardiff Central, London Kings Cross, Gravesend, Rainham, and Redhill. For those of you who know your UK geography you’ll realise that’s a massive area to cover, but long evenings studying train timetables told us it should be doable.
However, at the end of May a spanner was thrown in the works when Bradford Forster Square opened a platform zero as well! Like the others, this happened because they expanded the station on the “other” side of platform 1, and it’s easier to give the new platform the number 0 than it would be to renumber all the existing platforms.
We couldn’t make this work with the timetables unfortunately, so we decided to split - Clare went off to do Bradford, while Jeremy and James did Doncaster and Stockport. So, starting in Edinburgh at 5.50am and finishing in Redhill just before 10.30pm, we somehow managed to play at all 10, with only one train cancellation, a couple of delayed arrivals and two very quick lung-busting runs to make trains!
Hopefully the video tells its own story…