Friday 18 December - Travel to London

Building of the Day - Severn River Junction Signal Box which oversees train movements at the east end of the station.  The largest in the country

A London Midland train took us the Birmingham New Street and a Virgin train brought us to London.  We allowed plenty of time to transfer at the newly opened station in Birmingham.  It has a very spacious concourse but is awkward to navigate. There are ticket barriers to negotiate. We had three tickets each and only one of them would work the barriers,  The toilets are woefully inadequate while the escalators from the platforms are narrow and incapable of handling the crowds.  In fact little seems to have been done at platform level which maintains its blackened brick stygian Victorian gloom.

Our Virgin Pendolino to London with a Cross Country train arriving on the next platform.

It became milder as we moved south. In the Shrewsbury area there was a lot of standing water in the fields, the horses wore overcoats and the sheep were fitted with water wings.  In the Birmingham area the sheep had Wellington boots while further south the horses were bare as were the sheep.

The journey went precisely to plan and we arrived in Euston a couple of minutes early.  I think this amazing for the Friday before Christmas.  We even scored seats on the Picadilly line across the to the hotel at Gloucester Road.

A late lunch was fish and chips and supper was marmelade flavoured ice cream