I use the Hope Valley service a fair bit

Also Westhumble & Dorking from London gets you the Surrey hills.

As far as finding trails – that’s what OS maps are for!!

Any station in the highlands.

North of Manhester, just pick a station, and head off from there.

Horwich, or Darwen and you’re straight out onto great moorland trails. Todmerden or Hebden Bridge and you’re onto great stuff in Calderdale

Ivybridge is on the southern edge of Dartmoor

Nobody mentioned Cannock Chase yet? I’m amazed!

Several stations near there.

From Bristol the obvious would be somewhere in South Wales. Cardiff/ Newport/ Cross Keys/ Caerphilly/ Ponty… anywhere really and not a long journey. Main problem is getting the bike on the train out of Bristol! Once on the Valley Line they don’t give a monkeys about bikes 😀

Nobody mentioned Cannock Chase yet? I’m amazed!

Swindon! Trail behind the Nationwide! Trail behind the Nationwide!!!!!! 😆

@nathanf

One way to check things is to use streetmap.co.uk – search for your chosen station then start scrolling around to see if you can see any bridleways nearby and try and make a route out of them. Streepmap uses OS maps so BWs are red long dashed lines (footpaths are the short red dashed lines).

Just about any station outside an urban area is likely to have bridleways close by, especially those in upland areas. We’ve used Ton’s idea of the Settle-Carlisle line a couple of times as we live close to the main feeder line for it: get a train then ride home via whatever trails we fancy.

As to whether they are “decent”: beauty is in the eye of the beholder and all that.

Train to Didcot, change for Goring&Streatley, cycle the Ridgeway to Avebury, then cut across to Chippy, train home. One very long day out.

Newton Abbot station puts you within about 20 mins of Bovey Tracey which is an ideal place to start an east Dartmoor ride..

Also try starcross station which allows you to access Haldon via a Tour of Britain kom ascent at Mamhead

Bristol-Newport; Newport-Abergavenny. Plenty around there to go at… up onto the Black mountains or the Beacons

Windermere 2 hours
Staveley 2 1/2 hours

As Staveley is the station before you get to Windemere and the journey takes 6 minutes I am surprised by that

It would still be my choice for the lakes though

+1 Barmouth (Morfa Mawddach station), almost endless options:

Sorry if already posted elsewhere. Local council proposing closing Barmouth Bridge to walkers and cyclist to save money.

https://www.change.org/p/gwynedd-council-keep-barmouth-bridge-open-to-walkers-and-cyclists

Swansea. Get off train, look at the 200m high hill just to the east, head for it. 15 mins later you’ll be climbing up the trails. Once at the top you can choose a variety of DH/techy trails.

Alternatively, head down to the seafront, maybe 5mins ride, head west along the beach to Clyne valley and you’ll find waymarked mtb trails (and plenty of locals trails.) about 25 mins ride from the station.

Or keep riding ’til you hit Gower and spend a few hours exploring one of the most glorious coastlines. Easily do-able from central Swansea.

I have never used a train to get to a ride, but Edale and Bamford in the Peaks and Church Stretton for the Long Mynd are very close to the start of good riding – especially Edale as it practically at the bottom of the climb up to Mam Tor!

Any of the stations on the Settle-Carlisle line. Great riding from Settle, Horton in Ribblesdale, Ribblehead or Dent (I don’t know much about the Dales north of there!). Or could easily do train one way and ride back, or multiday rides using the railway.

When I was a car-less student in Leeds we did all our climbing/walking by public transport – Peak District (Edale), Pennines (Hebden Bridge, Todmorden) or the Dales (Settle-Carlisle)

Also don’t forget other Dales stations. I often ride back from Clapham to Skipton to take advantage of the prevailing northwesterly winds.

There must be loads.

West Highland Line – take your pick
Windermere for Southern Lakes
Ivybridge for Southern Dartmoor
Newton Abbot for Eastern Dartmoor
Abergavenny for Black Mountains
Bangor for Snowdonia

As an off the wall suggestion there are occasional connections from Taunton main line through to Norton Fitzwarren / Bishops Lydeard for the West Somerset Railway for access to Quantocks and Exmoor. Qs are a fairly easy ride from Taunton in any case.

I also don’t think the OP is trying very hard.

FWIW My top tip – look at any of the above locations on Bing Maps and click on the Road dropdown and switch view to OS Map view and look for the green dashes.

http://www.bing.com/maps/?mkt=en-gb

Bizarrely ,Bangor….notsomuch.

I was thinking it’s not too much of a schlep to get up to Llanberis from there but you’re right thinking about it. Conwy would probably be a better drop off for Conwy Mountain trails

I’ve done Conwy to home (Wrexham) off road a couple of times over 2 days.Jumped on the train first thing and mooched back via Drum,Colwyd,Betws,Penmachno (kip at the Eagles),Ysbyty Ifan,Bala,Glyn Ceriog,Llan and sofa.

Plenty in Hampshire and West Sussex but not sure what the bike situation is like on the service that runs from Cardiff through bristol to Southampton and Portsmouth which would be your starting point

There are stations close to both ends of the SDW and a few along the route

Woburn 15 minutes from Milton Keynes Central station.

Strines Station (on the Manchester to Sheffield line) is ON a great trail. Come out of the very small car park and you have to be careful not to get clattered by people screaming down the Fox Inn descent! Go up the climb (and the great rocky one after it) and you are staring straight at Kinder Scout and the rest of the Dark Peak. Superb mountain bike trails all the way to Ladybower and beyond from Strines or Marple stations.

Great response, thank you all for your input!

I’m quite new to riding so I’m clueless when it comes to finding new trails. Looks like I’ll be planning a few trips to Wales, Peaks and Scotland.

Thanks again!

I also don’t drive, and have even considered writing a book or putting together a website about this exact issue. I live in Sheffield, so am already winning when it comes to accessible trails, and my parents live in north Wales, pretty much next to a train station… plus I recently spent 3 months living in Inverness. So I thought I’d share…

Peak district – check out the monkeyspoon website – it doesn’t really seem to be updated anymore, but most of the trails they mention are still very rideable, and easily accessible via the stops on the Hope valley line (Hope, Edale, Grindleford, etc.) which runs hourly between Sheffield and Manchester. I took a friend who’s new to MTBing up from Hope to Potato alley the other day and (I think) he loved it, so that’s worth checking out.

North Wales – the Marin Trails are fun, relatively easy and easily accessible from either Llanrwst or Betws – it’s a trail centre but whatevs. A really fun ride (or I enjoy it, anyway) is to set of from Dolwyddelan and head north over the landrover track to Pont Cyfyng. From there you can either head down to Betws-y-Coed (and the train station) or head over to Llanrwst (and the train station). Alternatively, you can head to Plas y Brenin on the fire roads, and then pick up the by-way that goes up to Tryfan/Cwm Idwal, and then either double back in order to come back to Betws, etc. or keep going down towards Bangor.

Scotland – there’s a couple of books called “The Wild Trails” vol 1&2, which have loads of circuits which are accessible from train stations, although they don’t usually make it terribly clear how to do that. The ones I did were:

– Torridon circuit from Achnashellach station – absolute 5 star classic, but long, hard and technical, so perhaps not for beginners. Also the station is amazing in it’s own way.
– Ben Alder from Dalwhinnie station – not especially hard, but very very isolated.
– Glen Tilt from Blair Athol – fun, quite a long day, with nothing to tricky
– Burma road from Aviemore
– Loch an Eileen and Loch an Einach (sp?) also from Aviemore – fast, fun, easy.
– Glen Feshie from Aviemore – boring, wouldn’t really recommend. Also, there’s a bridge which the book I had says you should cross, which was washed away in 2011. Not sure if that’s been updated in later editions though.
– I also improvised an almost coast-to-coast from Achnashellach back to Inverness via Glenuaig, although that involved a fair amount of riding on the road, so I’m not sure about that one.

Besides the train lines in Scotland, there are also buses that allow you to take your bike, although the only one that I remember that does that is the bus from Inverness to Ullapool. From there you can get onto a coast-to-coast which is described in vol.2 of the books above, IIRC, and will get you back to a train station on the Inverness to Thurso line, although I’ve forgotten which one… Ardgay, I think.

If you do spend some time up there, it’s worth trying to make it over to Skye. I went over in January and again a few months ago, by getting the train to Kyle of Lochalsh and then cycling over the bridge to Broadford. It is a fairly unpleasant cycle ride down an A road to get there, but once you’re there you have access to all sorts of wonderful places, and in particular Glen Sligachan, which is described in one of the books above (vol 1 I think). I really can’t recommend Glen Sligachan highly enough.

Farnham – start of the North Downs way. Bail out train stations back to London along the whole route.

You’ll need a map to avoid the footpaths

Just to big up the Sligachan/Skye idea slightly more… I stayed in a B&B in Broadford which set me back about 50 quid for 3 nights (off season) but the guy who ran the place was a former bike mechanic, which was all kinds of useful when I broke a bit of bike on the trail. Otter Lodge, I think.