4 of us hope to be coming to Scotland for 2 weeks this June. How reasonable is it to see Scotland by train? We don’t want to take a “tour” group. We traveled England 15 yrs ago to see much of Country. But we found in visiting Ireland we had to hire a car to see most of the the Island. My husband missed so much focusing on the driving. Will be be able to see a lot of Scotland by train or just major cities?
Posted by
Yorkshire
1210 posts
There's a great little series called "all the stations" on youtube.
Get inspired , particularly Corrour
Posted by
205 posts
There is a map of the network at Nationalrail.co.uk.
Posted by
Royaume-Uni nul points, pas plus
2508 posts
You can see a lot of course but the train doesn't go everywhere
Posted by
3122 posts
There is Scotrail service to many small villages in fairly remote areas, so you would definitely not be limited to major cities. In addition, Scotland has a robust network of bus routes; see CityLink.
Posted by
OP
9 posts
Everyone has been so nice and helpful, thank you.
Posted by
Centennial, CO, USA
1883 posts
Probably better traveling by bus rather than train. Take the train between major cities, like Edinburgh to Inverness, but the bus is easy.
Travel times are LONG, so be prepared.
We just got home from Scotland a few weeks ago, and it was the first time ever that we rented a car on vacation in Europe. My hubby did a great job driving on the right side of the car. I don't think he was disappointed in not "seeing" anything. If we wanted to stop, we stopped (when we could find a place to pull off, roads are so narrow!)
I helped with navigation...we'd bought a Garmin before the trip, and it got us pretty much everywhere with no issues - expect when it wanted to take a "short cut" and we were in the middle of honestly NOWHERE for miles. ( we decided to turn around and go back the way we came and start over)
We loved the freedom the car afforded us. We could see a road sign and just go there... I don't think we missed anything. If you are just wanting to travel from town to town, bus or train would be the way to go, but you won't be able to see some of the out of the way places as easily if you don't have a car... planning seems to be harder too, and it all depends on the bus schedule, and NOT your schedule. IMO.