The West of England line
Two of these villages use this railway rather than the other one. Longburton is three kilometres from Sherborne and Bradford Abbas is two from Yeovil Junction, and both of those stations are on the line from London Waterloo to Exeter.
The other railway runs from Bristol to Weymouth and serves the remaining fourteen villages. The two cross at Yeovil, and that crossing is the thing worth understanding before you buy a ticket.
This is not the same railway as the other one
They are different lines, run by different operators, and at Yeovil they use different stations about two miles apart. A journey that looks like a change at Yeovil is a journey across the town.
If you are going somewhere on the other line, read that page rather than this one.
North to Salisbury and London Waterloo
- TemplecombeTMC
- SherborneSHE
- Yeovil JunctionYVJchange for Yeovil Pen Mill, by shuttle
- CrewkerneCKN
- AxminsterAXM
- HonitonHON
- FenitonFNT
- WhimpleWHM
- CranbrookCBK
- PinhoePIN
- Exeter CentralEXC
- Exeter St DavidsEXDchange for Plymouth and Cornwall
South to Exeter St Davids
The calling points are from a real service. No times: the service read was a rail replacement bus, which the same feed gave away by offering a Yeovil Junction to Yeovil Pen Mill departure, a journey with no railway on it.
The times between stations are not filled in yet.
Where it goes
South west it runs through Crewkerne and Axminster to Honiton, and then down to Exeter, where it ends at St Davids alongside the main line from Paddington.
North east it carries on beyond Templecombe to Salisbury, and from Salisbury through Andover and Basingstoke to London Waterloo. That part is not drawn above, and the next section says why.
Getting to a city
This line's advantage over the other one is London. It runs there directly, with no change at all, which the Bristol to Weymouth line cannot do from any of these villages.
| For | Change at | Then |
|---|---|---|
| London Waterloo | no change | straight up the line |
| Salisbury | no change | straight up the line |
| Exeter | no change | straight down the line |
| Plymouth and Cornwall | Exeter St Davids | the main line west |
| Southampton and Portsmouth | Salisbury | then along the coast |
| Bristol and Bath | Yeovil, but see below | the other line |
| Weymouth and Dorchester | Yeovil, but see below | the other line |
Yeovil has two stations and they are not the same place
This is the one that catches people out, and a journey planner will cheerfully sell you a ticket through it.
Yeovil Junction is on this line. It is the one your train calls at, and it is the station Bradford Abbas uses.
Yeovil Pen Mill is on the other railway, the one from Bristol to Weymouth, and it is about two miles away on the far side of the town. There is a shuttle between the two, and it does not run often.
So changing lines at Yeovil means crossing the town, not crossing a platform. For Bristol and Bath it is usually quicker to go up this line to Salisbury and round, or to start from a station on the other line in the first place.
Why there are no times on this one
The other line's drawing has the minutes between each pair of stations, read off one real service. This one does not, and that is deliberate.
The services read for this line gave twenty minutes from Sherborne to Yeovil Junction, which is five or six by rail. They were not trains. The same feed was offering a departure from Yeovil Junction to Yeovil Pen Mill, and no railway runs between those two: that is the road shuttle across the town. What was read was a replacement bus timetable, and twenty minutes is about right for the drive.
So no times are shown here rather than road times labelled as rail. The departure boards on the village pages do show replacement services while engineering work is on, and each one is marked as a bus.
The stations and their order are from the same source and are not in doubt. If you want to know how long a journey takes, the departure boards on the village pages are live and are a better answer than any drawing.
Where the drawing stops
It begins at Templecombe rather than at Waterloo, and that is a limit of the source rather than of the railway. The service that answers about Sherborne answers about the stretch of line around Sherborne, so asking about these villages returns the stretch these villages use. Asking from Salisbury returns the London end instead, and the two do not overlap, so stitching them together would draw a line with a hole in it. Trains do run north of Templecombe, through Gillingham and Tisbury to Salisbury and on to Waterloo.