One of six car parks … Transport to and from Hay-on-Wye

I arrive at Hay on Saturday 23May, the beginning of the long weekend. It is a brilliant day, the sun is shining, the sky is pale blue and the border countryside between Wales and England presents itself in all shades of green. Congestion is the last thing I expect, but that is precisely what I come up against as I approach the festival town. Transport (with all its modalities) is often the best way to judge the size of an event. There are six car parks at Hay, each accommodating between 200 and 600 cars. Next to the official council car park, there are at least another five set up provisionally in the fields. They all cost more than the council car park – three to five pounds for a full day as compared with £ 2.20 for the council car park, but the money earned goes to charity. The town has also set up a special shuttle service from the town centre to the festival site. This costs £ 1 for a full day. There are also bus connections to the surrounding towns and villages accommodating festival visitors. It is all well thought out and works in an amazingly efficient way. Festival posters and signposts welcome visitors and thank them for coming. Everybody is friendly and polite, it is almost unsettling to come across so much positive feeling, which – and this is much more – sounds and feels authentic.

By comparison, travelling to Hay by train is not as easy as going there by road. From London, the route to Hay starts at Paddington, where the Great Western Line departs in the direction of Swansea or Cardiff. You must change at Newport (around 2 hours away from Paddington) for a regional train to Hereford, and from there the only way to Hay is by coach or by taxi. The latter costs a minimum of £ 40 and the train ride from Paddington to Hereford anything between £ 40 and £ 200, depending on how early you have booked, what type of a ticket you buy and how flexible you want to be. If you want to remain adaptable, then you can end up paying lots of money for a train journey in the U.K. – a frustrating state of affairs considering the unreliability of the connections, especially of the regional network. On weekends it is even worse due to construction or repair work. Having gone through this experience once already, this time I choose to travel half-half: to Newport by train and from there by car.

One of the discussions I attend during the second day is about the British railways. Matthew Engel, former sports and political columnist for ‘The Guardian’ has recently written a book entitled Eleven Minutes Late. Eleven minutes is just the time over the threshold for determining whether a train is formally late – formally as regards claims for ticket reimbursements and the like. Engel has tested the British railways and his findings are both comic and devastating. Compared especially with all other European railways, the British railways are rock-bottom. What is more, they are not even an environmentally-friendly mode of transport, given the low degree of track electrification. In any case it is impossible to get to Hay-on-Wye from London in less than four hours either by train or by car, or by combined transport. But this poor accessibility also makes up part of the charm of the English and Welsh countryside and, if you were to believe Matthew Engel, of the British railway system, too. As long as you are not in a hurry to get somewhere on time and have made your own arrangements about food, the journey is worthwhile.