England-Belfast SailRail via Dublin

[185143]

You state this as a fact repeatedly but you can quote no sources for it.

It is a reasonable assumption that the Irish sold sail-rail are not included in ORR figures, if nobody is bothered enough to enter the NIR/IE timetable date they aren't going to manually collate and input the sail-rail sales and assign them to Holyhead. It is not even a given that UK sold tickets are assigned to the port stations as they are not in fact sold to/from those stations.

My observation as a regular user of Dublin - Holyhead is that daytime sailings will load at least 1 bus from terminal to ferry. My last 4 trips were massively varied from a handful on an overnight Sunday morning to 4 full bus loads on an afternoon in summer. how many of those were sail-rail I have no idea but it is not in the least used station league. A conservative estimate of an average of 10 per sailing would still put it in around 50k/year.

I did Holyhead-Dublin on a Sunday morning sailing in June and there must have been at least 3 bus loads of foot passengers onboard.
Very unlikely to have had any SailRail passengers though given the previous train had arrived in Holyhead on the Friday evening thanks to a strike.

The ferry was quite busy, by far the busiest crossing I've had with the exception of a Belfast-Cairnryan in the midst of the P&O *ahem* issues. The coach was over half full up to Ayr, and this was early April. I suspect anyone going to Glasgow itself as a would be foot passenger uses the scheduled coach service from Belfast to Glasgow, it's a similar price I think and more convenient undoubtedly.

 

[bib]

Foot passenger numbers can be pretty high actually, but most foot passengers get collected by friends/family, take the coach or park at one end.

Yeah for Belfast-Glasgow journeys there's a number of bus options which make a lot more sense than changing onto the train at Ayr.

 

[Trainbike46]

I did Holyhead-Dublin on a Sunday morning sailing in June and there must have been at least 3 bus loads of foot passengers onboard.
Very unlikely to have had any SailRail passengers though given the previous train had arrived in Holyhead on the Friday evening thanks to a strike.

The ferry was quite busy, by far the busiest crossing I've had with the exception of a Belfast-Cairnryan in the midst of the P&O *ahem* issues. The coach was over half full up to Ayr, and this was early April. I suspect anyone going to Glasgow itself as a would be foot passenger uses the scheduled coach service from Belfast to Glasgow, it's a similar price I think and more convenient undoubtedly.

The coach and sail options, whether the Citylink or the hannon coaches one, are more expensive to glasgow (most of the time), and have a tendency to sell out, so it's by no means a given that the coach is a better option.

Though, as the coaches connect to 3 crossings, and the SailRail only connects to one (outside of the summer season, that is), timings can be better for the coach