Meet the man who’s travelled to every train station in Britain

If you expected the man who’s just completed an epic four-year challenge to visit every railway station in Great Britain to be some kind of train nut, you’d be mistaken.

“I’d describe myself as a travel enthusiast rather than a train enthusiast – I’ll use any transport to get somewhere nice and somewhere new,” he tells The Independent.

The man in question is 36-year-old Stuart Boyd from Alston in Cumbria, but followers of his mission might better know him as Every Last Station – or @every_station, his social media handle. Since first having the idea for the project in 2017, Stuart’s Twitter following has grown from nothing to more than 7,000, capturing the imaginations of fellow rail travellers across the UK.

“I started with Twitter as somewhere to log my travels and store my pictures,” he says. “I wasn’t aware it was growing until it got to 700 or 800 people – and then it built by around 100 followers every trip.”

The reaction from people when they hear about his journeys is uniformly wistful – “I wish I could do that” being the most popular response.

But how did he end up doing it?

“I was watching a YouTube series called All the Stations – I quite enjoyed it but was disappointed that they didn’t visit every station. It went from there, with me wondering how difficult it would be to do it properly and visit every single station. That’s what kickstarted it all.”

For many of us, the thought would likely end there – as an idle musing, before all the busyness of life shunted it to one side again. But, for Stuart, it provided the perfect template for his future trips.

“I always liked travelling, but the biggest headache was figuring out where to travel to – and this meant I already knew,” he says.

He got going properly in mid-2018 and didn’t take it too seriously to begin with, simply using his days off to get exploring by train locally. But he did always have one golden rule, right from the off: he had to board or alight at every station, rather than simply hopping off and on again. Every train service has its own unique code, so when Stuart planned his journeys, he made sure every train used had a different number. “Because the whole point was to explore new places – just jumping on and off wouldn’t allow for that,” he says.

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