Information about Winster in the Derbyshire Dales
for residents and visitors
Information about Winster in the Derbyshire Dales
for residents and visitors
NEW (Sep 2008) - See separate page on summary of options for Trains To London.
East Midlands Trains operate all trains from Matlock, and London trains from Nottingham, Derby, Chesterfield, and Sheffield. Their "walk-up" fares are horrendously expensive, but if you can plan ahead, there are some decent deals to be had - as with other companies, the sooner you book, the less you pay. It pays to use EMTs own website or call centre (08457 125 678) rather than the market-leading Trainline website - the latter impose additional fees for using a credit card, for posting (or even collecting) tickets, and last time I checked, they added travel insurance unless you remembered to remove it - not nice people to deal with. If you want a real travel bargain, you can travel for as little as £2 each way between Sheffield, Chesterfield, or Derby and London, with a Megatrain deal. As you'd expect, availability is limited to less popular trains, but if you can get organised enough to book ahead - and work within their restrictions, this can be a brilliant deal.
If your trip includes travel on the East Coast Main Line (London-Peterborough-Doncaster-York-Newcastle-Edinburgh-Glasgow) it can be usefully cheaper to buy a fixed-train ticket for the East Coast section separately using the East Coast website. If your trip involves using a Cross-Country service (Plymouth or Cardiff-Bristol-Birmingham-Chesterfield-Sheffield-York-Newcastle-Edinburgh), then using their website can make sense: whilst they do charge for postage of tickets, you can pick them up from the machine at Matlock station without extra charge - and the benefit of using their site is that you can choose exactly which seats are reserved for you (at least on Cross-Country services).
The Trainline have a useful "Best Fare Finder" that can help find a good deal.
Winster's nearest railway station is at Matlock, at the end of a single-track branch-line with trains every hour (two-hourly on Sundays) to Derby and (except on Saturdays) Nottingham. Click Here for current "departure board" information for Matlock - it doesn't pick up delays once trains have left Ambergate, but it can still be useful. You can also download a copy of the printed timetable - the version valid from May 2010 (probably until December 2010) is here. (If I've forgotten to update this in December 2010, try finding "Table 56" on the (pitiful) National Rail website.
There is now a ticket machine at Matlock station. This will sell you tickets for immediate travel, and you can also use it to collect tickets that you have bought online. (Although the online systems ask you to specify which station you will collect from, the "word on the street" is that whichever station you nominate, you can take your reference number and credit card to any ticket machine and it will retrieve and print out your booking.) According to the rules, if you get on a train at Matlock without a ticket, you might only be offered a full-price fully-flexible ticket - but at the moment, guards seem to be more flexible.
Connections at Derby for trains to London are pretty good, with an 8-minute cross-platform connection for most trips.
Only those of a sporting disposition should think of combining train and bus to get to Winster via Matlock: whilst there are a few times in the day when a train arrival at Matlock appears to fit well with a bus departure from outside, the timings are too tight to make for a reliable connection. When it works it is great, but you need a Plan B in case the train is more than a couple of minutes late. One exception: the last bus (2315 from Matlock) is a "generous" connection from the last train, which arrives around 2250.
Watch out for Sunday (and sometimes Saturday) engineering works - the less-than-intelligent people at East Midlands Trains time the replacement bus to take over an hour from Derby, and the bus arrives enormously early at each stop, then waits for ages until the allotted departure time. Towards Derby, the replacement bus leaves much earlier than the train it replaces - if travelling at a weekend, do check first - 08457 484950, or see below for online options.
The nearest mainline station is at Chesterfield - the far side of town, but not too bad to reach even at busy times. The station car park has CCTV (albeit just a couple of cameras) and charges £8 per 24 hours if you arrive before 10am on a weekday, otherwise £4 per 24 hours. You can park from Friday to Monday for £15. There is also onstreet parking for free in Piccadilly Road which seems reasonably safe and is within about five minutes' walk (a bit spooky really late at night, but OK otherwise). Unfortunately, many types of ticket to London from Chesterfield are considerably more expensive than from Derby or Matlock.
Derby has nearly all of Chesterfield's trains (and the odd extra one too) but traffic problems are much more severe and the station is at the opposite side of the city centre. All three of their Car Parks are expensive - £11 per 24 hours (£6 for the first 24 hours if you arrive after 10am on a weekday). You can park from Friday to Monday for £22. It's no cheaper to use City Centre car parks either (those with CCTV are even more expensive than the station).
For ease of access, it might be worth trying Long Eaton station (close to Junction 25 on the M1) where many Derby to London trains stop. For the greatest flexibility of service, Loughborough is an option - most trains on both the Derby and Nottingham lines stop there - but the car park only takes 140 cars, so may be an issue on busy days.
East Midlands Parkway station near Junction 24 of the M1, is potentially a better option for parking, but the timetable is not clever - it may boast two trains per hour, but these are very badly timed, with a 53-minute gap between trains if you are unlucky. The parking charge is currently (July 09) £5 but is set to rise at some point to £9.
Train travel to Leeds is now much improved, with a decent hourly service from Chesterfield - typically taking 1hr to 1hr30. Changing at Doncaster rather than Sheffield can result in a more comfortable journey.
For travel to York, Newcastle and Edinburgh, it is often easiest to drive to Doncaster (when I last checked: £10.50 per day weekday parking; £5/day at weekends). Newark is also a viable option - about 80 minutes' drive, but a secure car park (space may be tight on weekdays) and very fast trains from there to London or the North on GNER.
For Manchester, there is a station at Buxton (cheap parking if you buy a train ticket), but the service (about once an hour, taking an hour) is very slow - you can usually overtake the train if you drive on to Disley (where the station is next to the A6). A bit further still is Hazel Grove station, which has many more trains, and free parking (which fills up early in the day on weekdays). There is also the advantage that the 192 bus runs from Piccadilly Gardens to Hazel Grove every 10 minnutes until the small hours (0040 Mon-Wed night, 0140 Thur night and 0255 on Fri and Sat nights when I last checked), so if you miss the last train (which is around 2310) you can still get home. A "Greater Manchester Wayfarer" ticket could be better value than ordinary tickets - ask at the station. New Mills is another option (two stations on different lines, with New Mills Central having a slightly later last-train back from Manchester (dep 2324 last time I checked) - but I can't advise on parking options.
Grindleford or Hathersage are also options for trains to Manchester (Hathersage is better if you want the first off-peak train in a morning) but beware that there is a high chance that your train will be a noisy and rattly bus-body-on-rails.
The most authoratitive site for times (but not fares) is National Rail, who also offer a useful (but large - 2Mb) UK rail map in Acrobat format. You can call them on 08457 484950 (or 020 7278 5240 - less memorable, but may be cheaper, depending on your phone company). You can now consult a PDF file of the full National Rail Timetable online - but ridiculously, they publish corrections updates as a separate supplement rather than bothering to correct the original. So by all means browse the PDF files, but before relying on what you see, check with an online source to see if things have changed.
You can get train times from the National Rail Journey Planner - not perfect, but it includes some useful features, like the ability to find first and last trains of the day for any route.
For complicated trips, you might want to try DB (German Railways) (in English) - it allows you to choose the quickest journey between two points, and you can check on likely catering, intermediate stops etc. To check platform numbers - try the North-East Journey Planner (which actually covers trains across the whole country).
BUT beware that these "secondary" sites may not be fully up-to-date on engineering works, so once you've sorted out your preferred option, you need to check against the Trainline or National Rail in case one of your trains turns out to be a (re-timed) bus!
For Eurpoean rail tickets, DB (German railways) have a UK call centre that will sell you European train tickets, on 08702 43 53 63.
To get an idea of when cheap advance-purchase tickets will go on sale (some trains have so few cheap tickets that they sell out almost instantly) - go the ATOC website and choose "Booking Horizons" (sorry no direct link, but the page name changes each time they update the data). But don't rely on it being right. This really is cowboy territory.