From St Ives, Falmouth is two changes away by rail. The St Ives branch train runs to St Erth in 11 minutes, a GWR or CrossCountry train takes you on to Truro in half an hour, and the Falmouth branch finishes the trip in 20 minutes. Those three rides total barely an hour, but with the connections a typical journey takes about an hour and a half.
Around half an hour of the journey is spent waiting, split between St Erth and Truro. Journey times hardly varied on the weekday timetable, from 83 minutes on the quickest to 92 on a typical run, so whichever St Ives departure you pick the connections work out much the same.
A few weekday journeys start on a bus from St Ives instead and pick up the train further on. The 06:45 leaves before the first train we found and the 21:15 after the last, but they took between 1h50 and two hours, so they are for when the rail times do not fit.
From 10:03 until 18:33 the two-change route leaves St Ives at three minutes past and 33 minutes past most hours, which gives you a train roughly every half hour through the day. Before ten, the options are the 07:32, 08:07 and 09:02; in the evening they are the 19:05, 20:05 and 21:05, an hour apart.
For a day trip, the half-hourly stretch is the time to travel. With the following St Ives train only thirty minutes behind yours, a missed connection at St Erth or Truro sets you back far less than it would on the hourly evening trains.
The A30 covers the 28 miles in about 52 minutes, roughly 40 minutes faster than the train, so this is one of the routes where rail is the slower choice. Trains finish at Falmouth Town, which is a 12-minute, 826-metre walk from Church Street.
Journey times and changes below come from the rail and bus timetables for Tuesday 1 December 2026. Weekend and holiday timetables differ, so check the day you travel.
From St Ives on the weekday we checked: about every half hour between 07:32 and 21:05.
By road it is about 28 miles from St Ives to Falmouth, mostly via the A30 — roughly 52 min with clear roads. Car parks in Falmouth are listed on the Getting Here page.