Travel to Ireland by Rail
One of the biggest kept secrets about the railways in the UK is the availability of cheap fares to Ireland by railway. Whilst most people tend to fly to places like Belfast and Dublin or other regional airports on budget airlines, it is possible to get a rail ticket from most UK destinations to Dublin via the ferry from Holyhead. For example the fare from York station to Dublin at the time of writing this article was only £49 return and the slightly longer journey to Galway costing £95 return (includes rail and ferry).
Obviously if you are travelling by rail to Ireland , the journey is going to take longer than the plane and you may have to change several times, but if you are not a fan of flying like me or wish to avoid extra airline charges, then it is a viable option.
From York station, a Cross-Pennine train to Manchester Piccadilly leaving at 7.54am and arriving at 9.19am was boarded first. From Manchester Piccadilly, an Arriva Wales train was taken to Crewe (about 30 minutes travelling time) which connected with the 10.49 Virgin train to Holyhead to board the ferry. Whilst I have always been a fan of Virgin trains, as this particular train usually carries a lot of ferry users, it would be nice to have more space for luggage as the room above the seats is not big enough for a suitcase and the spaces at the end of carriages are too small and usually very badly stacked by passengers who just seem to dump their bags without any consideration for other people with luggage. However, the views of the Welsh coastline on the route south of Chester and through Colwyn Bay following the coastline more than make up for any oversight by the train operator on luggage space and with a bit of sorting out, I managed to squeeze our two suitcases in somehow.
After two hours on the train from Crewe, we arrived at Holyhead. There is just a short covered walk from the railway station before you check in at the ferry port. Two operators run daily services from Holyhead to Dublin, Irish Ferries and Stenna. We were booked on the Stenna Adventurer which takes three hours to reach Dublin, and on the return leg, we took the Stenna HSS from Dun Laoghaire pictured below. It is a long time since I have been on a ferry and it is easy to forget how big they are with restaurants, bars, shops and a cinema on board. Although the sea was a bit rough, the ferry was extremely comfortable, and the on board food and drink very good.
The only stumbling block on the whole journey was the connecting bus from the Dublin ferry port to Heuston station which has apparently not run for several years and no one in the UK seems to know this. However it was very easy to get a taxi and make the half hour journey across Dublin to the connecting Galway train departing from Heuston Station.
Obviously you could drive to Holyhead and take the car on the ferry but this can be quite an expensive option if there are only two of you and it is just as cheap to travel to Ireland by rail and then hire a car, which is exactly what we did. If you decide to do this, it is advisable to pre-book car hire online in advance as this will be considerably cheaper.
This entry was posted on Tuesday August 25th, 2009 at 12:00 PM and is filed under Places to Visit. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response.
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