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 Llandudno town — might be better and more directly served…
“more trains running to … Llandudno from December 2022. Watch this space.”
Although that might just mean to direct-from-Liverpool, something the local politicians have long been pressing for.
At present, getting to Llandudno town from Stoke-on-Trent involves three hours and two changes, on one of two routes…
Route 1: Stoke – Crewe – Chester – Llandudno Town. (The latter section is the Manchester Airport to Llandudno service, and as such may be crowded and luggage-heavy).
Route 2: Stoke – Crewe – Llandudno Junction – Llandudno Town.
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.
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.
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.
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 The above timetable site says “yes” via Arriva, but it may well be out-of-date.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.
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.
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.
Incidentally, searching Google for direct train service to llandudno 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 £1,000 a year to pay a train enthusiast to maintain it by hand.
The Spyders of Burslem 