The Wicklow Coast Line

There is a moment, not long after the train leaves Bray, when the land simply falls away. One second you are running behind gardens and back walls; the next the carriage is out on a ledge halfway up a cliff, and there is nothing between you and the Irish Sea but a few yards of rock and a long drop. This is Bray Head, and the railway that clings to it is the most dramatic stretch of line in Ireland — a piece of Victorian daring that you can still ride today on an ordinary commuter ticket.

The line is old. Its Dublin end grew out of the Dublin & Kingstown Railway of 1834 — the first passenger railway in Ireland, and one of the oldest anywhere in the world — which carried the city's citizens out along the shore to take the sea air at Kingstown, now Dún Laoghaire. In the 1850s the tracks pushed south around the great obstacle of Bray Head, and the man they called in to do it was the most famous engineer of the age: Isambard Kingdom Brunel.

Brunel's solution was to blast a shelf into the cliff and drive tunnels through the headland. It was audacious, and it was fragile. The sea hated it. Storms tore away his viaducts, the soft cliff crumbled from beneath the rails, and again and again the line had to be pulled back and rebuilt further inland — three major times over sixty years. Railwaymen and locals gave the whole heroic, doomed struggle a nickname that stuck: "Brunel's Folly".

And the fight goes on. The coast here is eroding faster than ever, and Irish Rail is now armouring the line against the rising sea to keep it open for another century. Ride it while you can appreciate exactly what that means — a working railway, more than 170 years old, still holding its ground on the edge of the ocean, carrying you south past the tunnels and the waves toward the "sunny south-east" and, at the very end of the line, the ferries at Rosslare.

The journey begins at Dublin Connolly, the handsome Italianate terminus on the north side of the city, though most travellers pick the line up further along at Tara Street or Pearse, in the heart of Dublin. From here south to Greystones the trains are DART — the Dublin Area Rapid Transit, the city's green electric railway — and the ride is lovely from the start. The line swings down to the coast and runs along the edge of Dublin Bay, past Dún Laoghaire with its great granite harbour piers, and on beneath the wooded hill of Killiney, where Victorian villas look down on a curve of shingle so pretty it was nicknamed "the Bay of Naples of Ireland".

Then comes Bray, a cheerful old seaside resort, and beyond it the main event. The train slips behind the town, climbs a little, and swings out onto the face of Bray Head. For the next few minutes it is pure theatre: the carriage runs on a narrow shelf high above the water, plunging into short tunnels cut through the living rock and bursting out again into the light, the sea breaking on the boulders far below. There are four bores through the headland now — the survivors and successors of Brunel's originals, the Brabazon, the Brandy Hole and the Cable Rock — and between them the line hangs in the open air with the whole sweep of the coast laid out ahead.

Look carefully on the seaward side and you can still spot the ghosts of Brunel's Folly: fragments of earlier alignment, a tunnel mouth going nowhere, the stumps of a bridge swept away in a storm. Each marks a place where the sea won and the railway had to retreat inland. The most drastic retreat came in the great diversion of 1912 to 1917, when a new tunnel over a thousand yards long — the longest on the whole line — was bored deep into the headland to carry the tracks safely behind the crumbling cliff.

The drama eases at Greystones, a bright commuter town that marks the end of the electric wires. Here the DART trains turn back, and the through service to Rosslare carries on as a single-track country railway, diesel-hauled, rolling south through gentler scenery. It calls at Wicklow, at Rathdrum on the edge of the wooded Vale of Avoca, and at the seaside town of Arklow, then runs down into County Wexford and the flat, sunlit farmland of the south-east. At Wexford town the train does something you rarely see any more — it trundles slowly along the quayside, on rails laid in the open beside the harbour road and the moored boats, with the water on one side and the town on the other, before continuing to its journey's end at Rosslare Europort, where the big ferries load for Wales and France. From the cliffs of Bray Head to the deck of a ship, in a single afternoon.

The line carries two very different services, so how you ride it depends on how far south you are going.

To Bray Head, Bray and Greystones — the DART. The scenic cliff section is on the electrified commuter railway, and the DART runs it frequently all day: roughly every 10 minutes at peak and about every 20 minutes off-peak, from early morning until late evening, in each direction between Dublin (Connolly/Tara Street/Pearse) and Greystones. There is no need to plan around a timetable — turn up and go. Dublin to Bray takes about 40 minutes; Greystones, just beyond Bray Head, about 50–55 minutes.

All the way to Rosslare — the Intercity. Only a handful of longer-distance trains run the full length of the line to the ferry port each day, so these are worth planning around. The times below are the Monday–Friday through services (as of the timetable valid from December 2025):

The end-to-end run takes about 3 hours. Northbound, trains leave Rosslare Europort for Dublin at roughly 05:35, 07:10, 12:50 and 17:55 on weekdays, timed in part to connect with the ferries. A reduced service runs on Saturdays and Sundays (typically three trains each way), and additional trains run the shorter Dublin–Gorey commuter section.

Always check the live times before you travel, as departures shift with the seasons and the ferry schedules.

Operator: Iarnród Éireann (Irish Rail) — irishrail.ie (opens in a new tab). Use the Journey Planner or the Dublin Connolly–Rosslare and DART route timetables for exact times.

This is an everyday public railway, not a tourist special, which is the beauty of it: the finest coastal ride in Ireland costs no more than a normal fare. For the scenic section around Bray Head you want the DART, paid for most simply with a Leap card — tap on and tap off — or with a single from the machines or the Irish Rail app. A classic day out is the DART to Bray, the cliff path to Greystones, and the train back.

For the full run to Rosslare Europort you need an Intercity ticket on one of the through trains, cheaper booked in advance through Irish Rail. If you are heading for the ferries, check that the arrival lines up with the sailing. Cross-Dublin transfers to Heuston for trains west are easy, but allow time.

The line strings together some of the most rewarding day trips within easy reach of Dublin, all of them reachable on the same ticket.

The DART covers the first four on its own, and an intercity ticket carries you the rest of the way south. If you only have one day, the classic is to ride out to Bray, walk the cliff path to Greystones and take the train home — but the Wicklow Mountains and the far south-east are what reward a second and a third.

Because the whole line is an easy hop from Dublin, most travellers ride it as a day trip and stay in the city — but the coast towns make a lovely, quieter alternative, and there is a good spread of choice all the way south.

Dublin is the obvious base, with the largest range of hotels, guesthouses and hostels in the country and the DART on your doorstep. Staying near the coastal stations — around Sandymount, Blackrock or Dún Laoghaire — gives you the sea air and a short run into town.

Bray and Greystones both make relaxed seaside bases within the commuter belt: Bray has traditional seafront hotels and B&Bs beneath the Head, while Greystones has a handful of smart small hotels and guesthouses and a good food scene, perfect if you want to walk the cliff path at dawn or dusk.

Further south the choice turns to country hotels, farmhouse B&Bs and self-catering cottages. Wicklow town and the villages of the Vale of Avoca suit walkers heading for Glendalough, while Wexford and the resort villages of the south-east coast — Rosslare Strand among them — have beach hotels and guesthouses handy for the ferry.

We don't book accommodation, and we keep no affiliate hotel deals on this page — we would rather point you to the right sort of place and let you choose. For train times and connections to any of these towns, see the timetable above.