More on Victorian train travel
If you're interested, there is an 1895 Great Britain and Ireland Bradshaw's digitised here, so you can get an idea of the travel times involved:
Whitby was served by three lines back then - only one is still open in 2022:
You're looking at six hours just to get to York from St Pancras - you can do it in just over two with a modern electric train from King's Cross. The two stations are next to each other.
In any event, it's a hard timetable to read so I won't venture to make an exact routing calculation, but 10-12 hours is quite reasonable. This was in a train that didn't exactly have heating and certainly didn't have air conditioning. There were also luggage allowances. In any event, a lady like Lucy Westerna couldn't be expected to hawk around her own trunks and you would often arrange them to be sent on ahead for a long stay.
For shorter trips, especially in London and also in the branch lines, you were often dealing with closed compartments. If you've ever seen a Sherlock Holmes movie, there's a chance you'll have seen them. The Bluebell Railway has a surviving set of 1890s Metropolitan Railway carriages, used on what is now the Metropolitan Line.
