Railtours
This page and contents last changed on
Friday 12 April 2019
(the Twitter feed’s contents below may have been modified more recently)
Saturday 11 May 2019: HDL East Anglian Explorer railtour to Norwich, Oulton Broad North, and Lowestoft
Our second outing of 2019 is to Norwich and Lowestoft, and to Oulton Broad North for those visiting the East Anglia Transport Museum (at additional charge, see below) in Carlton Colville.
This 428-mile railtour starts at Hastings and serves the usual stations to Bromley South and Kensington (Olympia), and runs along the North London Line to Stratford. It traverses nearly the entire 114-mile length of the East Anglia Main Line via Colchester and Ipswich. Those alighting at Norwich will have 4½ hours to visit the medieval city.
The final 23-mile leg of the trip is to the seaside resort of Lowestoft, the most easterly settlement in the UK. On approach, we stop at Oulton Broad North where a special bus service is being laid on by the Museum to convey our passengers to its 50s Seaside Celebration event—please indicate on the form if you wish to use this bus service. Entry to the Museum will be by way of a flat-rate £7.00 fee payable either (to be confirmed) on our train or on the bus-journey.
Club Class passengers are seated at tables, and the fare covers refreshments including a meal with wine on the return leg of the trip.
Booking
Details and booking-instructions may be found in the leaflet, which can be filled in on your computer prior to printing (this helps ensure legibility and accuracy); we encourage you to use this method. Fares are also displayed below. Finalised timings will be published here in the days leading up to the trip.
We are again trialing print-at-home ticketing: if you have use of a printer, please don’t send an SAE: instead, your tickets will be emailed to you; this is to reduce the workload of key HDL staff and to avoid the worry of tickets being lost in the post.
Tickets are sold subject to our Code of Conduct. Children under 16 must be accompanied by a responsible adult. Smoking is not permitted on our train. Bicycles cannot be carried, except folding bicycles with prior approval. If you wish to bring a mobility scooter, wheelchair or buggy you must inform us on booking, giving its dimensions.
| Standard Class fares | seat in trailer coach (CEP or DEMU) | £72 |
| bay of 4 seats in trailer coach | £280 | |
| seat in motor coach (E) | £79 | |
| Club Class fares | seat in trailer coach | £98 |
| seat in motor coach (A) | £105 |
If you cannot view PDF files, or the given method of booking is not convenient to you, please email us or ring 07501 478676 and we will provide further details and/or post you a paper copy.
Update: 12 April
This outing is virtually full. We have processed the backlog of outstanding bookings up to the above date. At this point there was just 1 seat remaining, so you may wish to express interest in a seat and be placed on a waiting-list to take advantage of any cancellations which may arise.
The train will be formed as shown below on departure from Hastings station, with Coach E leading.
| Coach A | 60118 Tunbridge Wells | Club Class DEMU motor coach |
| Coach B | 60501 | Club Class DEMU trailer |
| 69337 | Standard Class BIG buffet car | |
| Coach C | 70262 | Standard Class CEP coach |
| Coach D | 60529 | Standard Class DEMU trailer |
| Coach E | 60116 Mountfield | Standard Class DEMU motor coach |
Updates relating to The East Anglian Explorer railtour are given via an extract from our Twitter feed, below.
Tweets from HDL about our next railtour:
Plans for future railtours
We ran or co-run five outings in the course of 2017, and three in 2018; thank you for supporting these outings!
We continue to formulate plans for future railtours, taking into account the various restrictions imposed by weekend engineering work and the availability of traincrew.
Details of, and booking-instructions for, our future railtours will appear here when they are available; when that happens, those on our emailing list & our followers on Twitter will receive notifcation.
We are progressing outline plans for railtours as follows:
Saturday 6 July 2019: proposed railtour to Lydney and the Dean Forest Railway; date now seemingly confirmed (contrary to what we posted here previously)
proposed railtour to Princes Risborough and Quainton Road: previously pencilled in for 17 August, but now seeking a date in September.
Until properly advertised, these outline plans are unavoidably subject to cancellation, modification or change of date (except where stated to the contrary).
Code of Conduct
It is a condition of holding a ticket for any outing on our train that passengers abide by the letter and spirit of our Code of Conduct.
Leaning out of windows
We continue to endeavour to keep our passengers safe by not allowing them to lean out of our train’s windows. This notice contains further information.
Folding bicycles
It may be possibile for you to bring your folding bicycle on the Hastings DEMU, with prior written approval; our guidelines on carriage of folding bikes will help you to determine your bike’s suitability for carriage.
Railtour Archive
We can recommend a dip into the HDL Railtour archive, which contains details of all the previous “days out” which HDL has operated to date.