Epilogue - From One End to The Other

As End to End journeys go, my own was hardly what you'd call direct. But then that was never the point. My primary aim was to discover if it really was possible to hop from one local bus service onto the other all the way from one remote end of Britain to the other. And... well, I’ve established that actually it is possible. So - job done. 

Mind you, I certainly haven't broken any records. The shortest distance from Land's End to John O'Groats by road is reckoned to be around 838 miles, depending on how you calculate it. Some people clearly a lot hardier than I have cycled it in less than 48 hours. The record for running it on foot is nine days. Just let that sink in for a minute... My own journey totalled 1,876 miles, give or take, which I completed over a period of 28 days, so I seem to have found an extra 1,000 miles from somewhere. But even then that's eight days longer than the record for completing it on a skateboard, for goodness sake. 

Day 1

Do I care? Well, no.

If I'd really wanted to prove a point I could have hopped off that first bus from Land's End straight onto a train at Penzance, then on to Crewe to meet the overnight sleeper to Inverness before taking the X99 and a mid-week bus to John O'Groats. Gee whizz, I’d have completed the entire journey in 22 hours and 45 minutes. Not much of an achievement, though, when I would have missed so much of what lies between.

All told, my wanderings brought me into contact with no less than 79 different buses of all shapes and sizes, as well as four coaches, three modern trams and a restored vintage tram. In addition, I've enjoyed rides on 3 preserved buses, about half a dozen London Underground trains, a London Overground service through the oldest under-river tunnel in the world, a 1938 Underground train in service on the Isle of Wight which is reckoned to be the oldest public transport vehicle still in daily service, and one of the very last British Rail slam-door commuter trains. I also used a taxi-bus, a funicular cliff railway, five ferries of varying shapes and sizes, Europe’s longest escalator and a hovercraft. The whole trip has cost me around £355, which works out at about 19p per mile.

Now I'd promised myself that I wasn't going to do this, but now that I've begun to list everything I suppose it is tempting to list the best and the worst of the things I’ve encountered on my travels – you know, the ‘Best Bus Service’, ‘The Most Attractive Ticket’ , 'The Best Use of an Inspectors Cap in a Passenger Emergency’, that kind of thing. That, of course, would be totally crass. So here goes.

Day 8

The smartest and most comfortable bus I travelled on was probably Stagecoach’s 700 Coastliner service from Southsea to Hove. That was a Wright Enviro 400, if that's important. It was smooth, clean and extremely comfortable. I travelled on one of these from Manchester to Hyde, too. Frankly, they are everything a passenger could wish for.

The worst bus is a little trickier. One of the Western Greyhound minibuses I travelled in rattled so much that I thought it was going to shake itself to bits, and there were a few others that were pretty scruffy. But the least attractive bus was, coincidently, also a Stagecoach bus – their 500 service from Carlisle to Stranraer, that elderly single decker which looked like it had last seen service as a compost bin. At the time it seemed odd that Stagecoach should be running vehicles quite this decrepit when the rest of their fleet was generally so modern, but let’s be charitable. Perhaps it was a spare pressed into service at the last minute as an emergency replacement. I hope so.

The best journey is a tricky one, too, as there are literally dozens of contenders - Dumfries to Stranraer (Day 22 -wonderful, despite the tatty bus), Swanage to Bournemouth (Day 4 - beautiful), Snake Pass in the mist (Day 16 - stirring), Lancaster to Keswick (Day 20 - oh, stunning), Northern Skye (Day 26 - Oh, oh...), Glen Shiel (Day 27 - no, no, stop it...), or perhaps over the Pennines in that 1959 Bristol Lodekka. Or what about that hovercraft from Ryde to Southsea....

Day 18

The worst journey is difficult, too, because no matter how bad they got they weren’t actually that bad at all. Yes, the road between Yarmouth and Newport on the Isle of Wight was so rutted that it threatened to dislocate my hips, the agonising crawl through South London was... well, agonising, and the journey from St Helens to Manchester was fairly grey and featureless. But they were all perfectly tolerable. I didn’t sit next to anyone who smelt like a pig farm, or get caught up in a gang fight, I wasn't robbed or molested in any way and I didn't leave a bus with half a kilo of chewing gum stuck to the back of my trousers. Waits at bus stops were generally brief (with one or two exceptions). As an experience, it was all totally survivable and much of it was actually rather nice.

Not that this will cut any ice with some. It was endlessly interesting to see people's reaction when I told them what I was doing. Some were intrigued, one or two were even excited, but most were appalled. A handful stared in blank amazement, one or two even backed away slowly. And it was only after I'd completed my journey that I came to appreciate why.

I found myself with a little time to kill in Thurso before my journey home so I went looking for a book to read. I stumbled upon a charity shop selling second-hand books and it was there that I discovered a book by Lynn Sloman called 'Car Sick – Solutions for our Car-addicted Culture'. As well as offering practical suggestions for living without a car, she argued that we as a society habitually remember public transport as being much, much worse than it actually was and imagine private car travel as being far better than it actually is, and that this aberration affects many of our transport decisions. 

As evidence, she quotes research carried out in Darlington, a town I passed through on my journey. A marketing company was tasked with asking local people to estimate how long a particular journey might take by private car and by public transport. The answers they received were rather surprising. 

They discovered that people generally over-estimate the length of a journey by public transport by an astonishing 70%, assuming that a 20 minute journey would take more like 34 minutes. By contrast, those same people would habitually under-estimate the length of a car journey, believing a 20 minute car ride would only take 15 minutes. The same exercise was repeated in Germany with remarkably similar results.

So why do people get it so wrong? Well, one reason might be that the private motor car is heavily promoted and... well, we believe the propaganda. Think about it – or more importantly, think about any car advert you may have seen recently on TV. I bet it showed a shiny new car being driven effortlessly at exhilarating speed along a clear empty road (or even, less believable yet, a clear empty city street). Yet you and I know that the reality of driving in 21^st century Britain is, for the vast majority of people, the polar opposite. Yet we still buy into it. 

Of course, there are huge, persuasive and well-moneyed forces at work here, a vast industry of car manufacturers, dealerships, tyre manufacturers, insurance companies, coachbuilders and car repairers, publishers, TV producation companies and accessory manufacturers who are only too willing to persuade you that your life would be incomplete without a car. By contrast, public transport operators spend a fraction of the motor industry's marketing budget on promoting themselves. They just can’t compete. Frankly, it's a wonder anyone travels by bus.

I set out determined to experience what it was really like to rely solely on public transport. I have to admit, perhaps because of this unconscious distrust of public transport I have just described, it wasn't something I was especially looking forward to. I'd expected to find it mostly unreliable and inconvenient but in fact almost everything went like clockwork. Buses mostly turned up on time, drivers were usually extremely polite and helpful, journeys were far less tiresome than I'd anticipated. I was only let down on a couple of occasions - once at The Lizard when my bus didn't to turn up, and once in Killin when I arrived for a post bus service that had been scrapped, a mistake I probably wouldn't have made had I been a local. 

Day 2

I'd also set out to investigate the past, present and future of public transport. The past I found in abundance, not only in the museums I visited en route but in the historic vehicles I was lucky enough to travel on and in the tales associated with the places I visited. 

The present has been pretty well covered, too; after 28 days of travel through towns, cities, villages, moors and glens on almost every type of public conveyance imaginable I reckon I've experienced it all – though I didn't manage to travel on a hybrid-powered bus. Next time, maybe.

The future is more problematic. Will more of us be opting to travel by bus in the future? Well, there has been some evidence of a gradual drift towards public transport, but it’s patchy. There has been huge passenger growth in London, but it is worrying that the capital still accounts for fully half of the 4.7 billion public transport journeys made in Britain each year. Outside of the capital, the picture is much less rosy and there is scant evidence that people are willingly abandoning their cars and choosing the bus instead.

Yet if fuel prices continue to rise, as seems inevitable, and more of us are unable to afford to own and travel by car, then we'll probably have little choice but to fundamentally alter our way of life and make more use of communal transport. If you find that a worrying prospect then you can probably relax. On the evidence of this trip, it's not nearly as bad as it might sound.

Day 22

Which brings me to the one overwhelming impression that this journey has left me – that this country of ours has some of the finest, most uplifting, most varied and exquisite countryside you could ever wish for. I’d scarcely noticed it before, but then it’s easy not to notice the view when your gaze is permanently fixed on the car in front and you have neither the time nor the altitude to gaze over the hedges and across the fields. Yet travelling all this way by bus has taught me that it’s possible, even on a single decker, to look out over the roofs of cars and over walls and hedges at the great British countryside in all its varied glory. And freed from the responsibility of having to not crash into things, you have time to sit back and enjoy the view. Honestly, it’s a complete revelation. Try it.

The very last bus journey of my trip was from John O'Groats to Thurso where I am to catch the train home. I'm in a happy, relaxed frame of mind, despite a mild hang-over, and fall easily into conversation with our driver as we roll briskly along the coast road. He asks me what I'm doing in John O'Groats so I tell him. His reaction catches me by surprise.

“Oh, yeah,” he says knowingly. “ You’re my third one this year…”

You might have thought I'd feel a little crushed, but I just grinned foolishly. I felt strangely elated. Here was the evidence that I might, after all, be part of something bigger, a select band of travellers, and that the route I had been forging over the past month was one forged by others before me. It is a reassuring and joyous thought that out there somewhere, on buses and trams the length and breadth of the country, there were other daft sods like me doing what I had been doing, out of curiosity and just for the love of it. And ultimately, that's what doing the End-to-End is all about.

Perhaps this journey of mine might not be quite as mad as I’d thought...

NEXT: The Route I Took – with a complete list of all the services I travelled on each day, just in case you want to try it yourself. It will be 10 years out-of-date, however..!