The UK is a pretty well connected country in many ways, but it’s definitely lacking in some departments. For instance, you can’t actually get from Edinburgh to Cardiff on the train without changing. Yep, they may be the capitals of their respective nations, but there’s no direct route between them – until now.
Cross Country has announced that from December this year it’ll run a service between Edinburgh Waverley and Cardiff Central. It will have 22 stops in between including major cities like Birmingham, Sheffield, Leeds, and Newcastle. It comes as part of a major bi-annual railway timetable change, which will come into effect across the network on December 15.
The northbound journey will take just under seven and a half hours, and exactly seven hours on the trip back down south. It will also only be one service a day on weekdays, so bad luck if you were planning to travel on a Saturday or Sunday. It’ll leave Edinburgh at 1.07pm, and depart from Cardiff at 9.45am.
As great as this is, it will set you back a fair bit, with single standard tickets for the beginning of January currently sitting at about £109 without a railcard.
A spokesperson from Cross Country said the company is ‘delighted’ to introduce the service, explaining that it ‘[means] even more connections for customers across the length and breadth of the country’.
The Welsh cabinet minister for Transport and North Wales, Ken Skates, also voiced his support for the new route, saying, ‘connecting two capital cities of the UK in a sustainable way is a positive development.’
You can book your tickets for this service from your regular provider.
Train travel with Time Out
Loco for locomotives? In other recent news from our railways, you can get Christmas dinner on a nostalgic Devon steam train this festive season, this major rail line linking London with east England will be massively disrupted in November and December, and you can have a sneak peak inside the brand-new luxury Belmond sleeper train which will link up London, Cornwall, Wales and the Lake District soon.
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