Back in March 2025, I wrote a post about my mission to visit every railway station in Great Britain – including what it entails and how I track it. If you haven’t read that yet, it’s worth a look first, as it covers the rules/rationale, and some of my favourite moments along the way. Consider this the update! A lot has changed since then, so let’s get into it.
Getting off the train
One of the shifts in how I’ve been approaching the challenge this year is a more deliberate effort to actually get off at stations – not just call at them. The rules I set out allow a station to count as a “CALL” if my train was scheduled to stop there, even if I stayed in my seat. That’s always been a perfectly valid way to tick off a station and is still the backbone of the challenge.
Increasingly, I’ve been making the effort to step onto the platform, which upgrades a station to “PLAT” status. It’s a small distinction on paper, but in practice means a completely different experience – you properly actually see the place!
I’ve now “platformed” every station on the Elizabeth Line. Given how central the line is and how often I find myself passing through it, it felt like a satisfying thing to wrap up properly. Getting off at all of them was well worth doing.
I’ve also started taking selfies at every PLAT station where I can. There’s now a growing gallery on the website, which is both a useful record and a slightly absurd archive of me standing on various platforms across the country looking pleased with myself!
Liechtenstein
Yes, really. The mission has technically extended beyond Great Britain- I’ve ticked off Liechtenstein. In fairness, this wasn’t especially difficult: the country has exactly three stations, all on the Austrian federal railway rather than any domestic operator. But it felt like the right thing to do while I was in the region, and I’m not going to pretend I didn’t enjoy being able to say I’ve completed an entire country’s railway network!
Where things stand
As of now, I have 44 stations remaining before the Great Britain mission is complete. When I last wrote about this in March, the number was 335 – so a significant amount of progress has been made, including 50 stations ticked off by calling this year alone.
The 44 remaining break down roughly as follows:
- 1 on Southern: Pevensey Bay, which is one of those stations that manages to be awkward despite technically not being remote at all.
- 12 on Northern: including the two brand-new stations at Northumberland Park and Bedlington, which opened this year and immediately joined the list.
- 31 on ScotRail: this is the main challenge. The Far North Line features prominently, as do a cluster of stations roughly between Aberdeen and Edinburgh that require some planning to reach efficiently.
If you want to see exactly what’s left, I have recently put together a live database on my Notion site at harryburr.notion.site – it’s updated as I go. You might get the gist from that, they’re all, to varying degrees, awkward. Either geographically isolated, or served by infrequent trains, or requiring a day’s worth of travel to reach a handful of stations that are nowhere near each other. This is the nature of the challenge at this stage.
The ambition is to complete Great Britain by the end of September.
What comes after?
Quite a lot actually!
The most immediate next trip is Northern Ireland. I’m planning to complete calling at all of Translink’s NIR stations, and if the timing works out, I should be able to “platform” an entire line in the same trip. Admittedly, it’s a much smaller network than Great Britain’s, and with FIP coupons, should cost me nothing to complete (bar the hotels and air fares!)
Beyond that, expect a lot of writing. Once the Great Britain chapter closes, I want to go into more depth about the experience, reflecting on particular journeys and moments/learnings that stood out. There are stories I haven’t told yet, and some observations about the railway in this country that I think are worth sharing.
And then there is what I’ll coin stage two!
Having called at every station, the next logical step – some would say, I must admit, the more meaningful one – is to go round again and actually get off at all of them. Given that a substantial number of my current tally are CALLs rather than PLATs, this is a significant undertaking in its own right. Stag tow is the long game, but it’s already started.