{"id":9937,"date":"2022-07-11T16:06:40","date_gmt":"2022-07-11T15:06:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/potbanks.wordpress.com\/?p=9937"},"modified":"2022-07-11T16:06:40","modified_gmt":"2022-07-11T15:06:40","slug":"getting-to-llandudno-by-train","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/2022\/07\/11\/getting-to-llandudno-by-train\/","title":{"rendered":"Getting to Llandudno by train"},"content":{"rendered":"

The railway operator Avanti West Coast has the first details of their ‘from December 2022’ timetable. There’s a hint in the Express and Star<\/em> newspaper coverage today (talking about Staffordshire connections with Scotland and the North Wales coast) and also in Avanti’s official advance brochure, that North Wales — and perhaps even the resort of Llandudno town — might be better and more directly served…<\/p>\n

“more trains running to … Llandudno from December 2022. Watch this space.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Although that might just mean to direct-from-Liverpool, something the local politicians have long been pressing for. <\/p>\n

At present, getting to Llandudno town from Stoke-on-Trent involves three hours and two changes, on one of two routes… <\/p>\n

Route 1:<\/strong> Stoke – Crewe – Chester – Llandudno Town. (The latter section is the Manchester Airport to Llandudno service, and as such may be crowded and luggage-heavy).<\/p>\n

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Route 2:<\/strong> Stoke – Crewe – Llandudno Junction – Llandudno Town.<\/p>\n

Those down in Wolverhampton, rather than Stoke, used to be luckier. They could just hop on a direct train, no changes. That was the Birmingham International airport to Holyhead boat-train, via leafy Shropshire to Chester and then Holyhead for the boat to Ireland. It took the same time to Llandudno Town as from Stoke, three hours from Wolverhampton.<\/p>\n

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In the 1990s this boat-train service was a great throbbing heavy diesel to Holyhead, with old 1950s carriages that had proper sprung seats and good old-fashioned slide-down wooden windows. Wonderful. You wouldn’t have been surprised to see Will Hay walking along the platform at Wolverhampton, tapping the carriage wheels. <\/p>\n

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The sensible slide-down windows meant you could get the sea-air in, as the train began to hug the North Wales coastline, and you didn’t suffocate on a sunny day. It was a great journey, albeit with an icky bit for 20 minutes as the Telford-to-Shrewsbury commuters piled in. But fine after that.<\/p>\n

Sadly I’m not sure if the Birmingham – Holyhead train calls at Llandudno Town anymore. The above timetable site says “yes” via Arriva, but it may well be out-of-date. Since another and seemingly more reliable timetable site says “no”, the service now just calls at the Junction.<\/p>\n

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It gives the same for all the Birmingham – Holyhead service times. The service appears to take no once-a-day shunt into Llandudno Town. A little digging finds a press report which suggests the connection was lost in 2021 due to the lockdowns, along with the loss of the direct London – North Wales service. Some ‘Levelling Up’ needed there, I’d suggest.<\/p>\n

So there’s no ‘via Wolverhampton’ option any more (unless Avanti West Coast find a way, from Dec 2022) and it’s thus a toss-up, if travelling from Stoke. Route 1 risks running into heavy baggage\/crowding and wafting overseas viruses on the Manchester Airport to Llandudno service, but is cheaper (I suspect the airport service is subsided by the Tourist Board). Route 2 means you’d have to endure a change at Llandudno Junction and then the short hop into the seaside town on a local Welsh shuttle, and is also twice the price and gets you there later — the station is a bit of a 10-12 minute walk from the sea-front and you wouldn’t be walking onto the Promenade and looking at the sea until noon.<\/p>\n

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Incidentally, searching Google for direct train service to llandudno<\/em> shows just how useless all the robo-writing AIs are. Three pages of useless robo-pages to get past in the results, before you can find something written by a human and thus useful. The local Tourist Board could usefully work on getting a human-written page up top. The problem then would be to keep the information on it timely. But it would surely be worth \u00a31,000 a year to pay a train enthusiast to maintain it by hand.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The railway operator Avanti West Coast has the first details of their ‘from December 2022’ timetable. There’s a hint in the Express and Star newspaper coverage today (talking about Staffordshire connections with Scotland and the North Wales coast) and also in Avanti’s official advance brochure, that North Wales — and perhaps even the resort of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9937","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9937","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9937"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9937\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9937"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9937"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9937"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}