Just outside Coleford, Perrygrove railway offers a ride on a narrow-gauge railway and more…read more On entry we were greeted by friendly staff who explained the timetable and handed out a quiz sheet to each of our children together with a key that opens the appropriate prize box once you've finished. The aim of our time at the place was to explore the whole site finding shapes and pictures to answer the clues on the sheet. They provided two different sets of questions, depending on whether you want to just take the train or wish to wander through the wooded area. Next to the entrance there's a miniature 'village' inside that the kids can explore. There's a reasonable amount of scope for them to play hide-and-seek, crawl and run about, spy on Mum and Dad sitting in the cafe and invent other games to play. The railway journey takes you to the top of a hill and you have plenty to look out for on the way. There are a several places where you can get off and explore and there's no limit to how long you spend doing so; you can get on and off as much as you like. At the to of the hill there's a small covered childrens playframe built to a very high standard. From here a series of narrow paths lead down through the wooded area back to the main 'station' at the entrance. I'd suggest that if you have a pushchair, you might struggle pushing it along these paths unless it is one that has large wheels. Once you've finished wandering about outside collecting answers to the questions on the quiz, you return to the main building and enter a miniature 'village' to find your prize. The prizes are obtained by identifying the correct locker to open with your key. Inside you'll find some sweets and some 'party-bag' gifts. The cafe provides basic hot and cold drinks, sandwiches and simple heated-up food. There was also a small selection of items for sale; postcards, toy trains etc. It is spacious and you can just about see the trains coming and going. Prices were reasonable. We found Perrygrove a good place to spend a 2-3 hours and a good choice on a rainy day as well as with good weather.

Bristol Parkway station is located at the intersection of the lines from London (Paddington) to…read moreSouth Wales and the main line from Bristol to Birmingham, providing a major interchange between the two. It was one of the first 'Parkway' stations to be built, in 1972, to attract car users to trains by providing ample car parking at locations with good road links, close to urban areas. This site was chosen both because of the interchange it offered, and because of its proximity to the M4 and M32, just north of Bristol. When opened, shelter was fairly meagre, with 'bus stop' shelters on the platforms and a small waiting room and ticket office by the entrance to the car park. Because of its exposed and windy position, additional long platform shelters were erected, but it still had a reputation for being a cold place to wait for a train. Over the years, substantial suburbs have developed around Stoke Gifford, and in 2001, a new and much larger station building, with a dramatic curved roofline, was built in recognition of its growing importance. In 2007 an additional platform was constructed on the London-bound (north) side, to provide additional capacity. The station is now used by over 1.75 million passengers a year, with in excess of half a million passengers changing trains here. The station now has heated waiting shelters on the platforms, and the main building has a small shop, cafe and ticket office. Other facilities include a taxi rank, payphones, cash points and bus stops for local bus services (including to Frenchay hospital and Bristol city centre). The station has level access (via lifts to the platforms). The station is served by all long distance trains on the London-South Wales main line and the cross-Country main line from the South-West to Birmingham and the North. It is also served by local services from Gloucester, Westbury and Weston-super-Mare.

This is a great, modern, functional station on the North side of Bristol. It's close to the M4/M5…read moreintersection, so it's a far better place to collect someone from than Bristol Temple Meads (in the centre of the city) if you're located to the north of the city. However, there are a few things to be aware of: 1. Parking is £5 a day. The payment meters are awkward to operate, and if you don't pay you will get clamped & fined. 2. The car park gets full by 9:30am most days, and if you park outside an official space, you will get clamped (even if you've paid for a ticket). 3. Traffic in the area is hellish at peak hours. Journeys from the motorway to the station can take in excess of 45 mins between 7:30 - 9:00 and 16:00 - 18:00 for the 2 mile journey. The station is fairly new with good facilities: clean toilets, a small newsagent, a coffee shop and a sandwich shop. There are also lifts to all platforms for the disabled.

Five stars for the cafe; two stars for the station. The chef in the cafe was charming, friendly and…read moresang while crafting my sausage and egg bap. Was boiling over with laughter, loved his friendliness. The train station is closed on the weekends for rail work, which means it takes twice as long to get anywhere on the bus. Purchased the bus tickets from the train staff inside, who kept directing a group of us to talk to the bus coordinator, and the bus coordinator was not available/missing...poor show!

A small station with a fast main line service to London and the west of England. It has trains to…read moreWeymouth and Bristol so is an interchange. There is a ticket office and excellent toutist information is displayed in the waiting room.There is a coffee kiosk and taxis ard available here. It serves a wide area of south Somerset and there is a car park.

Brilliant station with such kind staff especially Lead man in customer services called Darren who…read morewas so helpful with laptop related disasters

A nice little station with only four platforms. It is the main station in Herefordshire. The staff…read moreare generally friendly. The cafe is nice, and, suprisingly, quite cheap.

Those who use a patch to give up smoking may ask, how much does the Patchweigh? This is unrelated…read moreto that. Patchway railway station is a super cute little station in the southwest of England close to Bristol. There are lots of little stations around here serving all the little Villages and towns and suburbs of Bristol and this is a great example of a typical Southwestern English rail station.

Patchway Station is a small station, well situated by rail. It's hidden away where not a lot of…read morepeople seem to know about it. There's free car parking. There are fairly regular trains to the centre of Bristol, towards the South-West, and to Cardiff, and at certain times of day there are even direct services that will take you to Birmingham, Manchester or beyond. If you're travelling to Cardiff regularly, tickets from Patchway are quite a bit cheaper than from Bristol Parkway. What a pity that it is such a desolate hole. The brick shelters smell of wee and are too small to keep more than 3 people dry. There are no ticket-buying facilities and the announcement system often doesn't work. As soon as it rains both platforms become giant puddles. At the risk of sounding old, Patchway station is also a hanging-out ground for an ugly teenage gang with nothing better to do. They document their sexual conquests across the station and I think they may be the reason that the shelters smell of wee. I wouldn't want to be waiting for, or getting off, a train here too late at night.

This relatively small train station is an easy walk to Downtown or the local Co-op. We came…read morearrived from Paddington in the early afternoon and only required minimal directions to get to our Hotel. We had printed out our tickets ahead of time for our return journey back to London. So all we had to do was figure out which side of the tracks we needed to be, wait in the enclosed seating area, and wait for our train. The architecture was mixed and somewhat unremarkable.

Moreton-in-Marsh is a small town in the Cotswolds, so its railway station is small compared to…read morestations in larger towns like Oxford. There is no self-service ticket machine in this station, so if you purchased tickets online and hope to use a self service ticket to print them out, you won't be able to do that here. I printed out all the tickets I purchased online months ago at Paddington Station since I knew I would not be able to do that. There is anagent from whom you can purchase tickets at certain times, so it's good to know their office hours. The ticket office also has information brochures on places of interest in the area. This station is only a few minutes from High Street, so it's very convenient for travelers or sightseers who might want to check out this town. If you don't have a car, you can take the bus going to towns like Stow-on-the Wold or Burton-on-the Water from this station.

Not as elderly as the Oldport…read more This is a large and fancy station in Newport with a beautiful space-age bridge and corridors connecting to the older buildings. It's very strange but also very nice. It looks like a pair of headphones or something - it's quite odd. But somehow beautiful. It's the third busiest station in Wales because it's in the Cardiff area, and it's been operating since 1850. You can actually go directly from here to Manchester, or all the way up to Holyhead, and Nottingham, and Birmingham, and various other major cities - and Portsmouth and Brighton and so on. The new Concourse was opened in 2010 and is space-age and beautiful. Some people have criticized it as being one of the ugliest buildings ever, but hey, it really adds something unmistakable in Newport.

Opened in 1850, Newport is (in 2019-20) the second busiest station in Wales after Cardiff Central…read more The station is situated close to the remains of Newport Castle near the River Usk. The station has gone through several rebuildings in its history, and until 2009 the main terminal building was the large brick office block with classical detailing, built in 1923 by the then Great Western Railway, on the south side of the station, close to the castle. In 2007 a new platform 4 was added on the north side of the station, and in 2009 a new entrance and concourse and a second bridge was built in preparation for the 2010 Ryder Cup, being held nearby. This provided new car parking facilities, a new concourse and taxi/drop off point on the south side, and a new passenger entrance on the north side. The old concourse and entrance in the 1923 building was then closed. The design of the new concourse and bridge has attracted some criticism, on grounds of aesthetics (it was nominated for the 2011 "Carbuncle Cup" for the ugliest building of the year), because it is further from the town centre than the old building, and because it has suffered from intermittent problems with rainwater leaking onto the concourse and stairs. It is also much smaller than the original building and can get congested. On the plus side, the developments have made all platforms accessible by lifts. Current regular services (pre-Covid) are based on 2 trains per hour to/from London, and hourly services to each of Portsmouth via Bristol, Taunton via Bristol, Nottingham via Birmingham, Manchester Piccadilly via Bristol Parkway, Manchester via Hereford and Crewe, and Cheltenham via Gloucester. All trains going west head stop at Cardiff, with hourly onward services to Swansea, Carmarthen and Maesteg. Some of the Carmarthen services are extended to Milford Haven. Occasional direct services also run to Brighton and Tenby. The station has a small cafe, newsagent/bookshop, toilets (accessible and with baby changing facilities) and a booking office. There is no cash machine. There are covered bicycle spaces, a taxi rank, and two nearby car parks. A handful of Newport Bus services also stop at the station.

Swindon is one of the traditional railway enthusiasts' meccas, as the 'Railway Town' of the Great…read moreWestern Railway (GWR), and its station has a complex but interesting history. It is still an important and busy station to-day. The line - built by the famous engineer, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, opened on 17th December 1840, to a temporary terminus at Wootton Bassett, and through to Bristol on 30th June 1841. When the GWR was being planned, Brunel and his engine designer, Daniel Gooch, decided that Swindon would make a good place to locate the main engine depot and engineering works. As well as being the junction for the line to Cheltenham and Gloucester, it was also the point at which the relatively level line from London changed to the more steeply-graded section to Bath. This was important in the early days, when steam locomotives were relatively under-powered, and the idea was that different engines would work the two sections. The GWR built what was effectively a new town - initially called 'New Swindon' - with a railway works, depot, 300 cottages for the staff, and a new station, opened in 1842. The station was - unusually - paid for by the building contractors at their own expense, and to recoup their outlay they built the first ever railway refreshment rooms (separate rooms being provided for First- and Second-Class passengers). The GWR agreed that all trains should stop there for a 10-minute refreshment break as they changed locomotives, which they did until 1895. But from the start refreshment rooms were famously awful - beginning the dreadful reputation of railway buffets! With a captive market, the owners charged high prices for inferior food and drink. Coffee was dispensed from an impressive silver urn in the shape of a locomotive, but this did nothing to improve its flavour. Even Brunel himself was moved to write this wonderfully stinging letter to the owners, in December 1842: " Dear Sir, I assure you Mr Player [the manager] was wrong in supposing that I thought you purchased inferior coffee. I thought I said to him that I was surprised you should buy such bad roasted corn. I did not believe that you had such a thing as coffee in the place; I am certain that I never tasted any. I have long ceased to make complaints at Swindon. I avoid taking anything there when I can help it. Yours faithfully, I K Brunel." To-day, railway Swindon is a shadow of its former self, with the works closed, albeit with some of the handsome buildings (Grade I listed) retained as workshops and the railway museum 'Steam'. But the main island platform buildings survive from the 1842 station, together with a new platform on the south side, opened in 2004. The historic refreshment rooms were located on the south side of the station, but sadly no longer exist, having been demolished in 1972 - in an astonishing piece of corporate vandalism by the former BR - to make way for the ghastly office block that now occupies the site. The growth and affluence of modern Swindon means that this is a busy station, serving nearly 2.5 million passengers a year, and remains the junction for the line to Stroud, Gloucester and Cheltenham. All trains from London to Bristol, Cardiff and Cheltenham stop here, as well as the occasional direct service to Oxford, offering a fast train to London every 15 minutes during the day, Mondays-Saturdays. The station has a couple of cafes (I've not tasted the coffee, though!), a small newsagents, waiting rooms and is fully accessible.

Clean efficient station with helpful staff. Lovely comfortable clean train to London Paddingtonread more

Previous reviews note correctly that this used to be an unpleasant place to find yourself on your…read moretrain travels. However, there have been some changes since those reviews. The footbridge has been rebuilt and is now wider. There is also now a lift so those with pushchairs or wheelchairs need no longer ask strangers or station staff for assistance. Indoor waiting areas have been built on the three most used platforms so waiting for connections isn't as chilly as it used to be. The ticket lobby now has more seating and has been modernised. The branch of the Pumpkin Cafe there is pretty average for the chain: serving a range of over priced food from unenthusiastic staff with greasy tables and chairs. It's no longer a distinctly awful place to be, is just an a average train station.

A tatty and run down railway station. God knows what any visitors to Gloucester think. Booking area…read morealways seems dusty and the staff never seem very happy. Mind you I don't blame them, thsy will answer any questions though, but it seems a bit of a effort to do so. Not sure what the cafe is like, but looks a bit blah. Small Taxi rank outside door, but the main taxi rank is 2 minutes across the road.