While I now live in Coventry, and spend the vast majority of the
year in England, I originally come from Bangor, in Northern Ireland.
(No, not Bangor in Wales.) For most of my friends, going home usually
involves a train journey of perhaps a few hours; but for me, going home
means getting across the Irish Sea, either by ferry or by plane.
When
I was very young, even up until I was 13, most of our family holidays
involved car journeys either to other parts of Ireland, north or south,
or across on the ferry to "the mainland" (i.e., Great Britain). From
1996 onwards, our preferred mode of ferry crossing was the Stena HSS, a class of high-speed catamaran capable of carrying up
to 1500 passengers and 375 cars, making them the largest high-speed
ferries in the world.
Although Stena had
grandiose plans, just three examples were ultimately built. The first,
the Stena Explorer, went into service in April 1996 sailing between Dun
Laoghaire (pronounced Dun Leery), just south of Dublin, and Holyhead, on
the north-west coast of Wales. On entering service, it sailed the
62-mile crossing in just 99 minutes, just over half the time that
conventional ferries took previously. What's more, the crossing was
smoother than ever before thanks to the catamaran hull. When introduced
it sailed an impressive five times a day in each direction.
The
second HSS, the Stena Voyager, entered service a few months later
sailing between Belfast and Stranraer, on the south-western tip of
Scotland. The crossing was shorter, at about 50 miles, and a journey
time of 85 minutes was initially advertised. However, unlike the Dun
Laoghaire-Holyhead route, which is almost entirely in open seas, both
Belfast and Stranraer lie at the head of long inlets. As a result, when
the HSS first tried running at full speed in Belfast Lough, it caused
such huge waves to head towards the shores - in particular, towards
Bangor - that for safety reasons they were required to reduce speed in
Belfast Lough, and also in Loch Ryan on the approach to Stranraer.
This
meant that the journey time for Belfast-Stranraer became 105 minutes,
still better than anything else that operated Belfast-Stranraer but
comparable to the fastest boats on the Larne-Cairnryan route. Larne is
about 20 miles NNE of Belfast in open seas, while Cairnryan is about 5
miles north of Stranraer; thus the Larne-Cairnryan ferries only had to
sail 35 miles, nearly all in open seas. For us, though, Larne was the
wrong side of Belfast Lough, and involved a 35-mile drive just to get to
the port; we were thus more than happy to save the driving and sail
from Belfast on the HSS.
A third HSS, the Stena
Discoverer, was put into service in 1997 sailing between Harwich and
Hoek van Holland, but that was it. While the HSS continued to sail on
its three original routes, it was - at least economically speaking -
fatally flawed: it was powered not by conventional diesel engines but by
gas turbines, like you'd find in jet planes, with no conventional
propeller but instead four water jets providing both forward propulsion
and directional control. This gave the HSS its speed, but also meant it
consumed far more fuel than any other comparable ferry.
High
fuel consumption wasn't such a problem in 1996, when oil prices were
low and looked set to stay that way indefinitely; however, by 2008 oil
prices had soared and so cutbacks had to be made. The number of sailings
was gradually cut from five to just one or two round trips per day, and
journey times were prolonged in order to save fuel. The Stena Explorer
even stopped sailing between Dun Laoghaire and Holyhead altogether
between September and May, replaced by conventional ferries. Finally, in
order to shorten the journey a little, the dock at Belfast was moved
down Belfast Lough by a few miles - saving fuel but prolonging journey
times to the port.
Ultimately, however, it
wasn't enough to save the HSS. The Stena Discoverer was withdrawn from
the Harwich-Hoek van Holland route in January 2007. The other two
survived a while longer, but the Stena Voyager was withdrawn from
sailing the Belfast-Stranraer route in November 2011. The Stena Explorer
faces an uncertain future on the Dun Laoghaire-Holyhead route; whether
it will return to service in May, as planned, remains to be seen.
The
Stena Voyager was replaced by two conventional-hulled large ferries,
Superfast VII and VIII, originally built in 2001 to serve
Helsinki-Tallinn. In introducing these two new ferries, Stena decided
they needed to upgrade the facilities at their now rather dilapidated
port in Stranraer. Here, they decided to do the same as they had done in
Belfast and move the port a few miles down Loch Ryan to save fuel -
also giving them more space to build a larger terminal building. The new
port is now nearer Cairnryan than Stranraer.
The
move from Stranraer to Cairnryan makes little difference to car and
lorry traffic - which make up the bulk of Stena's throughput - but was a
disaster for foot passengers. You see, while Stranraer has a railway
station, Cairnryan does not. This thus forces any foot passengers
wishing to use the ferries to use a bus to the port. Rather than bussing
ferry passengers from Stranraer station to the port, Stena have decided
instead to bus passengers from Ayr.
This is mainly down to the nature of the railway line from Ayr to Stranraer: it doesn't
pass anywhere near Cairnryan, because instead of following the coast
the line curves inland to follow a valley, only rejoining the coast
briefly at Girvan. This makes the line slow and winding, making it
faster to bus passengers along the A77 from Ayr than rely on the railway
to Stranraer.
It
also means there is no easy way to provide a station at Cairnryan,
without building a new seven-mile connection from the line at Stranraer.
As such, the very reason for the existence of the railway line south of
Ayr - the connection to ferries to Northern Ireland - has been removed
at a stroke. Passenger numbers have fallen through the floor in recent
months, with only the towns of Girvan, Barrhill and Stranraer to sustain
the line.
At this
point I should declare an interest: I can't drive. So the existence of a
relatively integrated public transport system in which I can get a
train to Stranraer and then a ferry to Belfast is important to me.
However, much as I enjoy making the train journey to or from Stranraer,
it normally takes at least seven hours from Coventry - about four hours
to either Carlisle or Glasgow, and another three hours thence to
Stranraer. It was not, to put it mildly, the fastest way of getting
home.
It was,
however, the cheapest: at £25 single (with a railcard) all the way from
Belfast to Leamington, it was an absolute steal. Nonetheless, the fact
that it was at best a full twelve-hour journey meant that I only did it
once in full, and once more when I was up in Edinburgh and then heading
straight home. However, while the fares haven't gone up, they have
become less flexible; in theory you used to be able to get those fares
on the day, but now you must book in advance; combined with the hassle
of getting a bus, I doubt it's an option I'll be availing myself of
anytime soon.
To me,
most of the time, going home means flying. Cheap short-haul air travel
has put a severe dent in the ferry companies' business over the last 20
years by removing the necessity of a long drive through
north Wales or southern Scotland. Normally I can book a few weeks in
advance and have change from £100 for a return flight home, which while
it works out at double the cost, it takes less than half the time to get
there.
I almost
invariably fly between Birmingham and Belfast City on Flybe, formerly
Jersey European, who fly a very large range of domestic flights within
the UK as well as some cross-channel flights to Paris and other parts of
France. (I've flown with them so many times, I almost know their safety
announcement off by heart...) With an average flying time of about 45
minutes, I can reliably get between my house in Coventry and home in
Northern Ireland in less than four hours.
Flying
even permits day trips from one island to the other: in 2004/05 when I
was looking at different universities I flew over on various day trips
for open days; more recently I flew home for a day in November 2010 for a
hospital check-up (it was easier to fly home than to rearrange it).
Doing so by ferry would be all but impossible nowadays. That said, even
up to 1990 there was a daily sleeper train service between Stranraer and
London, which would have permitted a 36-hour round-trip on two
sleepers, but that's nothing compared to a same-day trip.
However,
flying is not really a sustainable mode of transport. It uses much more
fuel than a ferry, and given the finite supply of oil in the world
there will come a point where short-haul air travel is no longer cheap
and available to the masses. When that day comes - be it in ten, a
hundred or a thousand years' time - we will rue the day that Stena
decided, for short-term commercial reasons, to break the link between
ferry and train at Stranraer.
At
least for the time being the connection at Holyhead remains, but at the
other end one either arrives in Dun Laoghaire and needs a suburban
train into Dublin, or one arrives in Dublin Port and has to get a bus to
one of Dublin's railway stations. It is that, combined with a slight
instinct of distrust towards Irish trains, that has thus far put me off
going via Holyhead by train. That said, as a means of getting between
Northern Ireland and England by road, Dublin-Holyhead is my family's
preferred route as it is shorter overall than Belfast-Stranraer, and
doesn't require such sustained periods of driving.
In
the meantime, I expect that most of my trips home will involve flying.
Yes, government responses to successive terrorist threats have made it
more difficult to retain one's sense of dignity as we pass through
security. Yes, you can't take a bottle of water onto the plane unless
you buy it at the airport. Yes, my ears don't always pressurise quite
right when we descend. And yes, eventually we will run out of oil and
future generations may despise us for using up two billion years' worth
of accumulated energy from the sun.
But
- and it is a huge but - for a modest sum of money, not only do I get
to soar above the clouds and see the world from above like our
forefathers could only dream of, I get to go home - a distance of some
400 miles as the crow (though not the aeroplane) flies - in just a few
hours. And until the day comes that short-haul air travel is
commercially unviable and we are forced to use what ferries and trains
are left, I shall continue to enjoy the simple pleasures of flying home.
