Vicki Pipe and Geoff Marshall are travelling to or through every stop on the UK’s rail network. Will they inspire a new generation of train travellers?

Railway stations are places we go to and places we pass through, places that are home and far from home, places we whiz through or wait at. They can be functional or baldly beautiful, eerily quiet or frustratingly frantic. Sometimes they sell sandwiches from Costa and sometimes from Pumpkin.

But whatever the station’s elemental essence, Vicki Pipe and Geoff Marshall want to visit it. The couple are four weeks into a 14-week odyssey to see and film Britain’s 2,563 National Rail stations. “We wanted to do something memorable,” says Marshall.

They don’t have to get out at every station, but they have to be on a train that stops at the halt they want to tick off. They are also using taxis and lifts from friends to save doubling back on convoluted branch lines. They raised £38,000 on Kickstarter to pay for £745 14-day All Line Rover tickets, video editing and accommodation, plus plenty of cups of tea.

Their YouTube videos are feelgood snippets that, like Michael Portillo’s BBC series Great British Railway Journeys, revel in the small joys of our weird island life: arcade machines, ice-cream, niche museums, factories, castles, interesting landscapes, eccentric punters and the simple pleasure of riding the rails.

“We wanted to create a documentary series that opens up railways to new audiences and brings to light little-known stations,” says Pipe. “It wasn’t until we started that my mum told me that I had family who used to work on the railways. My great-great-grandad was a signalman at Shippea Hill in Cambridgeshire, the least-used station in Britain.”

A brief encounter at Britain’s least-used railway station Read more

Marshall adds: “We organised a flashmob at Shippea Hill. It recorded 12 passengers for the previous year, so on 3 June, we got 19 people to make the journey with us.”

After doing southern England, they are tracking north through the Midlands. But the highlights are yet to come. Pipe wants to visit Wemyss Bay in Scotland. “Corrour was a filming location for Trainspotting,” adds Marshall. “I’ve always wanted to go there.”

If Portillo ever hangs up his salmon blazer, these two would be perfect GBRJ successors. “Book a ticket, take a ride, explore the world. Do it by rail, because railways are brilliant,” says Marshall. “Isn’t that a Hunter S Thompson quote?”