To not understand where people park overnight (when getting a train)?

[dustofneptune]

We just moved from a city to a village a few weeks ago. (Cue "you're not in Kansas anymore" stupidity on our part...)

We're a 15min drive from the nearest mainline station (Moreton-in-Marsh, if it helps).

All good, but we have a 3-day trip to London coming up - and now we're wondering... errmm... what do we do with the car?? We're so used to just walking to the station or getting an Uber, this didn't even cross our minds until today.

If you live a drive away from a train station - how do you normally navigate it if you're going away for a night or longer?

Can you leave a car at a station for a few days? Or is that a terrible idea / not allowed?

Do you normally just pre-book a taxi instead? We've been quoted £60 round-trip by local firms! (Double what the return train tickets cost!) 😮

We've tried JustPark, but nothing comes up.

There are two buses per day to the station (lol) - but the timings are hours away from our booked train times. And we don't know if these buses are real buses or the mythical fabricated village buses that people talk about on here.

Are we missing something? (Aside from braincells...)

TLDR - What the flip do people do with their cars when they drive to a train station and are going to be away for a few nights?

There's a reason why stations are in the centre of towns. Them not being so would be far more inconvenient than anything you experience now.

I completely understand what living rurally is like! I grew up in a house where our 'next door neighbour' was half a mile away, where we used to walk up to the local farm to get our milk and where grass grew in the middle of the road.

Technically, anything 'not in an urban area' is rural. So yes, where I live now (even with a town a few miles away) is rural. We have no shop, no amenities- just a church, a village hall and a village school (c100 pupils). And yes, we can get uber too.
But I fully appreciate that there are rural areas with no uber, but it simply isn't the case that no rural areas have uber.

Buses on the other hand... totally non-existent!

@Kweeky - it might be more convenient for you to start your journey at one of these put of town stations by a motorway, but in a huge number of instances you'd probably want to end it IN the town/city you were travelling to!

There are out of town stations- often called Parkway stations - which are exactly what you describe. But in the main, travel to and from actual places is what people need.

Well everything is about public transport and using less fuel.
The railways north to south often follow the motorways and meet at places.
If you had fast buses connecting to this Rail Hub (whcih they do the airport I use) then people would prefer to use it. Less CO2 but expensive to build like all the fuel reducing exercises. How many thousand wind turbines or air heat pumps has the UK purchased from China over the last few years.

So when I arrive at my destination station miles from where I'm actually going slapped on the side of the motorway how do I get to the city/ town I actually want to visit?

Park at the station car park. Totally normal.

It's £30-ish to park at my nearest station car park for a week, so I leave the car at the village station one stop up the line, which is free.

Or get a local taxi to/from the station, which is about £6-8 each way.

Same way you get to and from airports.

If I have to drive 50 miles to the station then either hire a car or do a long shuttle bus journey at the other end I don't think I'd bother with the train bit in the middle - once I'm driving for an hour at either end I may as well drive the whole way. It's worth doing for a flight but not a trip from say Durham to Edinburgh or Birmingham to Manchester.

Oh my god, just reading through all your responses now. You guys are amazing! I expected to wake up to only three comments, all saying "you're an idiot, go back to the city already" 😂

I mean city living has clearly addled your brain 😂

That's what we assumed to, but when asking around here, people looked at us like we were mental and all said they just park on a friend's driveway 😂

All that pollution and street food has melted the grey matter 😂

Obviously 😂

By train then.

I’m intrigued- what was it that made you think you couldn’t leave the car in the station car park for several days? Did you think that:

1. it wasn’t possible to pay for multiple days in advance
2. The car would get ticketed or towed if left overnight?
3. it was too expensive?

All these things are a possibility but not standard in rural station car parks, glad none turn out to be true for yours.

😂😂I wonder if they sell them at Decathlon

Top trolling, 10/10 😂😂😂😂😂 imagine using your legs or a bus to get to train station, imagine a world where people didn't want to go to places on motorways, imagine removing the entire point of having any rail infrastructure 😂😂😂😂

😁😂

By that reckoning, nowhere in the southeast is “rural”. “Rural” and “isolated” are not the same thing.

Having a small market town within 10-15 miles does not make you “urban”

Uber are not the only taxi company (thank goodness). Surely there is a local taxi company that you can use. Usually much cheaper than parking for days.

for Trainport read Parkway - many of the Parkway stations are just that large carparks with the station usually to cope with commuter traffic and then they have buses that run to local town centre

I love our local station and only wish they would stop reducing services making it a satellite. Free parking and for us a 5 min walk or 3min run if train is imminent/gotta get over the bridge. Since lockdown there are always spaces as well hurrah

I am quite sure that most cities’ main stations already have buses serving them.

I live so rurally (albeit with towns and villages nearby) that I have to drive for longer to get to a motorway than to a village with a railway station, so parkway stations wouldn't work for me! However, the station parking is set up for people to leave their cars there - the nearest station to me (c. 35 mins) is £1 per day) and the second-nearest (c. 45 mins) is free. I reckon the less they charge daily/weekly, the more they're expecting people to need to leave their cars there longer-term. So OP's local station is moderately priced and that means it's not inconsiderate to leave it there overnight (if that was a concern). The ones charging £12 overnight or whatever are likely to be disincentivising long-term parking because it's more needed for daily commuters.

Both 1 and 2! We've never left the car overnight at a station as we could always walk / Uber / tram!