A Scottish Grand Tour by public transport
We have just returned from a two week
Scottish Grand Tour,
taking us from Birmingham
to Skye and Inverness, via Glasgow and Glenfinnan,
and back home via Edinburgh and Alnmouth.
If you are after photos, you can see some via my thread of travel haikus until I tidy them up for Flickr, but here I am going to write about the travel website I made for myself and how we used public transport throughout.
The site is still available to see at https://traintimes.org.uk/skye/
Design
- I was only going to be using this on my phone so I designed the site totally in mobile view. I made the page navigation appear at the bottom (with a flexbox) to keep it in easy reach of my thumb.
- I bookmarked the page to my homescreen for easy access, and the fact traintimes.org.uk already has a service worker that caches things for offline use meant the pages were still viewable if I had no signal.
- The front page emojis are always there now, but during the trip only the relevant line would have had the emoji next to it as a highlight.
- I gave each page a font size percentage, so that it would take about the right amount of space on my phone, adjusted manually per page.
- I used the free weather widgets from https://weatherwidget.io/ to put the source and destination weather on every page.
Tracking
The main purpose of the site was to both tell me what we would need to do next, and also to let me see if anything was going wrong (thankfully, nothing did!).
- Trains
-
For most normal trains, I linked to either my own live departure board,
RealTimeTrains,
and/or the live map at map.signalbox.io.
This made it very easy to check for any upcoming services, or the status of the train we were on.
- Steam train
- We were staying in Glenfinnan to watch the Jacobite steam train cross the Viaduct. This train is also tracked by RealTimeTrains, although there isn’t actually any live information available around the viaduct, so I didn’t really use this (except to check it actually was a steam train, as one of the two on our day was a diesel, which I guess might be quite a disappointment if you have travelled a long way?).
- Ferry
-
marinetraffic.com tracks boats, and lets you embed a map containing your fleet,
so I created a fleet of one boat, the Mallaig to Armadale ferry, and embedded
that on the page. More for fun than actual use, as I also linked to the Calmac status page;
while waiting for the ferry, it
was surprising how many cars turned up asking for a ticket to be told the whole
day was booked out and they would have to drive round to the bridge...
- Coaches
-
Citylink have a live map, so I adapted the code for my live tube/bus maps to fetch/use the data from
there only for the buses I was interested in (Portree to Kyle of Lochalsh, and
Inverness to Urquhart). It was good in the end that I prebooked both of these, as they turned out to be quite
busy.
- Buses
- Stagecoach buses all had live bus placement on bustimes.org and elsewhere, very useful when there aren’t a lot of buses for you to catch.
Cost
The ScotRail Scottish Grand Tour ticket is £170 for 2 adults and a child with a Family Railcard, providing 4 days of travel in an 8 day window. It does not include the ferry, and whilst it says it includes the bus on Skye, I don’t think there is a bus you can actually get, certainly not if you want to stay on Skye. We also felt it was just a tiny bit rushed, and wanted to take 9 days, not 8. So we did not actually buy this ticket, even though it was the inspiration.
Our trains within the loop ended up costing about the same; the train sections of the Tour came to £152.70, but we had to pay more for the buses on Skye, as we were staying there:
| Stage | Mode | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| Birmingham to Glasgow | Train | £64.87 advance, split at Oxenholme |
| Glasgow to Glenfinnan | Train | £54.50 on the day (split at Loch Eil, and buying a return as cheaper than a single) |
| Glenfinnan to Mallaig | Train | £16.55 on the day |
| Mallaig to Armadale | Ferry | £9.65 advance |
| Armadale to Portree | Bus | £24.70 group day ticket |
| Portree to Kyle of Lochalsh | Coach | £27.70 advance |
| Kyle of Lochalsh to Inverness | Train | £48.65 on the day |
| Inverness to Edinburgh | Train | £33 advance |
| Edinburgh to Alnmouth | Train | £12 advance |
| Alnmouth to Birmingham | Train | £71 advance |
Bases
Our three bases were Glenfinnan, Portree, and Inverness. Glenfinnan needed no additional public transport; in Portree we bought another group day rider to visit Dunvegan Castle on the 56, and had enough time left on our return to also use it to visit the Staffin Dinosaur Museum via the 57A and 57C. (The other day in Portree we booked a minibus tour round the island.) In Inverness we used Citylink to visit Urquhart Castle on one day (bit annoying you have to pick your return time, but they were pretty fully booked and it worked out fine), and bought a Zone 2 day ticket (coincidentally the same price as a Skye group day ticket) the other day to visit both Culloden one way and Rosemarkie fairy glen and beach the other (that last the unexpected unknown find of the holiday, and where I did a fluke 10-stone skim).
