Travelling through the UK

I have, due to studies, been based the last eight/nine months in Scotland. Scotland is an extraordinarily beautiful country, which has been to a large extent unspoilt by modern society. Whilst this creates a peaceful haven many communities in more rural areas are only reachable by bus and in many cases not even that. Bus transport in Scotland is incredibly expensive, but this post is going to be focused on traveling from Scotland to England, or rather more specifically Edinburgh to London.

Having done this trip now several times I can say unequivocally that the most comfortable way of making it is flying, but often it is unfeasibly expensive for the distance you are actually traveling or often it is just easier to jump on a train or indeed a coach. The trains are comfortable I have found and whenever I am on one the time seems to slip by incredibly quickly, so this is my mode of transport of choice. However, whilst prices for this stretch can be acceptable if one gets their act together in good time and books many weeks ahead of time, for a student who is -shall we say- spontaneous, prices are often pushed up to the unaffordable level by the time I actually get round to booking the tickets. Thus, usually the only form of transport open to me are the coaches.

Now, I fully understand that you get what you pay for when it comes to these things, and National Express coaches are often up to a third cheaper than train tickets, but still I wonder how they plan which service gets which coach. Twice now I have done this trip and twice now the coach has had to be swapped in Durham on the way down to London due to the Air Conditioning not working, and at that point we got a coach that was of an acceptable standard. This was also after having stood at the coach station for a full hour before my departure and watching two national express coaches leave of a perfectly nice standard before the 951 arrived which was considerably older than the previous two, and Edinburgh to London must be one of their longest stretches. A previous coach journey from Dundee to Blackpool (which meant three different coaches) all had coaches of a decent standard, one which even had plug sockets which seems to be rarity these days.

This complaint seems fairly minor in comparison to some of the horror stories that have appeared on the web. The drivers that I have had have not been rude, did not make any unscheduled stops, or driven in an unsafe manner, although I gather that some customers have experienced this. In times where train prices have risen the extent they have consumers are bound to start thinking of the coach as a viable alternative, thus it is in National Express' interest to put coaches on the road that are roadworthy from the start and do not need to be swapped mid-journey. They may also want to consider adding small things to the coaches -like plugsockets- that makes the journey ever so slightly more acceptable, as ten hours is a long time to not be able to use one's laptop.

I would like to finish this rant by pointing out that I have made the trip from Stockholm to Gothenburg (a journey of around seven hours) in my native Sweden and these have never broken down and have been comfortable and the fleet has been mostly updated. Thus it is possible to be relatively cheap and provide decent service.