TRAVEL ACCESS


Bus & Coach Travel
It’s the cheapest way of moving around Birmingham every day. Considering the fact that most of the people and students take the bus at least twice a day, as we noticed with our stay in Halesowen, it is indeed a cheap way of getting around. Generally it costs £1, though for us in compare with Spain, it was a bit expensive. We used the bus in the most of our trips all around Halesowen.

For those who study in colleges there are special bus services. With them most of us didn’t have to pay every day, just by showing a personal identification college card which had been given to us straight away by our partners, we could get to college every morning.

You can require, as well, different kinds of bonus-tickets such as:


1. “The daily return ticket” which is £1.40. This is available from the driver and provides great value, with this ticket you can use the bus all day long.
2. “The weekly ticket” which provides the best value for regular customers, it allows unlimited travel on public bus routes for 7 days at a time. The ticket can be purchased on any day of the week.
Rail Travel


Rail is the fastest and most convenient way to get around Birmingham. It’s a quick and easy way of transportation.
There are many different Rail-lines, we got around the city centre or made longer trips such as Birmingham-London, which was one of our many trips. Frequent trains serve London Euston, with a journey time of about an hour and a half from Birmingham International station. Journey times and frequencies are shown from that station. We used the train in our journey to London.


London has an underground system that covers the entire centre of the city and almost all areas in, what Londoners call, Greater London. In the beginning the underground system was quite confusing because of all the different lines and directions which were not used to, so we chose to use a map of the London Underground and planed our trips in advance. This way we knew where we had to switch trains and what trains we had to take.
During our stay in London we bought a daily ticket, so that we could use the underground all day long without paying every time. It seemed to us a very valuable ticket. For us it was very funny to use the underground as we do not have this transport service in our town.


Taxi

Black Cabs provide a 24hr service. Each taxi carries up to 5 people. Fares are per vehicle though the typical fare to Birmingham City Centre is approximately £16. All Black Cabs accept major credit cards and provide receipts.


Boat trip London

Along river Thames we found several tour boat operators, where we could buy tickets for a sightseeing tour on the river. We travelled on the beautiful river Thames and saw London and its beautiful buildings and sights from a completely different view. During this trip we passed several well-known bridges, like Blackfriars Bridge, London Bridge and Tower Bridge (the last one was the end of the tour). We also saw several famous buildings such as Royal Festival Hall, Shakespeare’s Globe and the Tower of London and a far-away sight of St Paul’s Cathedral.

 


 

 

Birmingham International Airport,

where we landed and took off