Horsham; Sunday, 27 July, 2025

Thankfully the shower was still working, though it was only at that point I realised that the extractor fan in the bathroom also wasn’t working – so clearly something fundamental had gone wrong in my room. I had a nice shower to at least wash the overnight sweat off and then headed down to breakfast.

After breakfast I quickly headed back to my room and made a formal claim against the Premier Inn Good Night Guarantee given I certainly hadn’t had a good nights sleep, before checking out of the hotel and mentioning to reception once again about the issues – and reminding them I’d flagged it the previous evening (having also covered myself with a tweet to the Premier Inn Social Media team) so they couldn’t try and claim I never raised the issue with them!

From the hotel I headed back up to the railway station to pick up the train 17 or so miles south to Amberley and the Amberley Museum.

Previously called the Amberley Chalk Pits museum and located on the site of former chalk workings and lime kilns the museum today has expanded beyond just the history of the site to a general history of industrial technology with exhibits on Electricity, railways, communications, TV, and historic buildings from around the region which have been relocated onto the site to preserve them.

The former mine railway has been rebuilt and provides a way of getting around the site, though the mine itself is closed to the public, as well as historic double decker buses also shuttling between the entrance and the furthest corner of the site.

Perhaps the thing the museum is most famous for is that the railway and the mine entrance stood in for Main Strike Mine in the climax of the 1985 Roger Moore Bond film A View to a Kill (Grace Jones, Christoper Walken and the final climax with the blimp over the Golden Gate Bridge), and there are a few references all around the site to that history, including several mine carts still having the Zorin branding from the film on them.

I spent several hours taking in the site, and could have probably spent longer, but I needed to get the train back to Horsham to collect my luggage and start my journey home, so I made my way back to the station only to find that my train had been delayed.

The train eventually pulled into Horsham exactly 15 minutes late, meaning that every trip in England this summer has involved a delay repay claim to be submitted – except for Beverly, where I had to cut the holiday short by a couple of hours to not be stranded because of cancelled trains – not a glowing endorsement of the UK rail network!

Back in Horsham I walked back to the hotel, picked up my luggage, dropped another reminder about the awful stay, and then headed back to the station. From Horsham there were two trains an hour back towards Croydon. The Southern train which was coming up from Portsmouth and Bognor Regis and a Thameslink service which was starting there. Based on the experience of the Southern train earlier and how full that was, I decided to opt for the slower, but considerably less busy Thameslink service to make my way back towards home and thankfully that turned out to be a good choice as it was on time the whole way and I had a table of four to myself for the whole trip.