The Travelling Post Office at Railholiday

Suitable For

Rail enthusiasts
Single people
Couples
Families
Dog Owners
LGBTQIA+
Guests with limited mobility
Guests without a car
Anyone wanting a low-carbon holiday
Walkers and cyclists
Bird watchers

Full information

Award winning Railholiday offer four beautifully converted Victorian railway carriages as self catering holiday accommodation beside the railway station in the pretty village of St Germans.

Our environmentally friendly conversions are carried out to offer the greatest degree of comfort while maintaining the fun character of the carriage. Each carriage offers something slightly different.

The Travelling Post Office is perfect for single guests, couples and families. It has a double bedroom, two bunks (suitable for children or agile small adults only), plus a double sofa bed in the lounge.

The Travelling Post Office featured on season one of Michael Portillo’s Great British Railway Journeys on the BBC. It has appeared on numerous other TV programmes, including most recently The Great Antiques Challenge.

For those with limited mobility, The Travelling Post Office is all on one level and has a parking space just outside. We can provide mobility aids and a RNID alarm on request. For guests in wheelchairs, we would recommend our sister carriage Millpool, which is fully accessible to an M3 rating.

St Germans train station is only a few metres away. This offers excellent public transport access to stations and scenic branch lines throughout Cornwall and Devon, plus connections to onward connecting buses. There are over 50 stopping trains a day. Because the location of the carriage is beside the platform in St Germans, the Travelling Post Office has fabulous views of the Cornish mainline.

There is a £50 low-carbon discount to anyone arriving by train, or who lives in Cornwall or Devon. There are direct services to and from London, Bristol and Cardiff.

Pets are welcome in Millpool, the Old Luggage Van and the Travelling Post Office. The Travelling Post Office has a ramp and we can provide a deaf alarm, wheelchair and mobility aids on request to all carriages. Unlimited wood for the stoves is provided free of charge from our ten acres of woodland.

Railholiday has won wildlife friendly and sustainable tourism awards, winning the highest accolade of all in 2016 with a gold from Visit England for their national Sustainable Tourism Award, Winner of Winners at the Cornwall Tourism Awards in 2018, Cornwall Sustainability Awards Most Sustainable Small Business in 2023 and iTraveller Staycation of the Year in 2021.

Guests have access to ten acres of woodland with snowdrops, wild garlic, bluebells and wild flowers. (Due to rough terrain unfortunately this is not accessible for those in wheelchairs).

St Germans is on the banks of the river Lynher, in an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty and Special Scientific Interest. Home to Port Eliot House and Gardens, which is open between March and late June, St Germans also boasts a community shop and post office, a pub, a wine bar, and an excellent cafe and gift shop (as featured on Beyond Paradise).

We are four miles from the nearest beach, with good public transport links to the fishing villages of Looe and Polperro.

Guests have the option to offset carbon with our plant-a-tree scheme.

Short breaks are available. We are open all year.

We offer a low-carbon discount of £50 to all guests arriving by train, or who live in Cornwall or Devon.

For more information please visit our website at www.railholiday.co.co.co.uk or like @Railholiday on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and X.

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Our latest newsletter

Sustainability

Railholiday have always been committed to being as sustainable as we possibly can be. Here are a few things that we do:

We are currently working towards achieving net zero, with regular carbon audits to monitor our progress

We offer a local carbon savers discount of £50 off for all guests arriving by train, or who live locally in Cornwall or Devon.

All our energy is sourced from renewables, and has been since green tariffs were first introduced in the late 1990s. (We use Good Energy and Octopus Energy). We also have solar panels that part-power the office and Old Luggage Van.

Mevy and Millpool are centrally heated by a biomass boiler, fuelled from wood from our own woodland. The Luggage Van and Travelling Post Office have wood-burning stoves (again fuelled by our own wood) and the Travelling Post Office has an air-source heat pump.

We recycle on a grand scale! All our carriages are derelict wrecks that are bought back to life using secondhand materials wherever possible. Every purchase is carefully considered for its sustainability value, from fabrics to white goods. Reuse is very important to us.

We produce our own home grown apple juice, for our welcome packs, reusing our bottles and tops so there is no waste.

Our gardens and woods are managed for optimum wildlife benefit. We make sure pollinators have flowers all year round. We never buy in flowers, but use fresh flowers from our gardens for our vases.

We plant trees! Over the years we have planted thousands of trees and hedges in our own woodland and a small holding near Landrake that we have access to. In addition we have a guest plant-a-tree scheme of £25 a tree. This is used for special trees and community planting. We double the value of the fund at the end of the year. So far the fund has paid for a community orchard at St Germans and Loveland in Penryn, and for trees for a re-wilding project on Dartmoor, as well as several specimen memorial trees.

We compost and recycle. We chose our waste contractors because they had the greenest credentials.

We support our local community, setting up a community shop and now volunteering in it, restoring a traditional May festival that we now fund the toilet hire for, involvement in the local Public Transport Users Group (six years as chair and seventeen years on the committee and counting). We have also bought a community defibrillator for use at the station and future plans include installing a community use drinking water tap.

All white goods, lights etc are low energy wherever possible. We work on the basis that all new items have a high carbon cost, so buy second hand whenever possible, and keep things going for as long as we can.

We save water; we have water buts, water storage tanks, a grey water system and a policy of not watering the garden (with the exception of targeted watering in times of extreme drought).

We write a fortnightly article in the local paper on environment issues and ways people can help, and a monthly article for our parish newsletter.

We take part in campaigns, fighting global warming and campaigning for social justice. We do this in many ways, from taking part in processions and banner making to letter writing.

We have a Green Acorn for Sustainability. This is a local and good value scheme, which is why chose it. In the past we have scored Gold for Green Tourism, and also score very highly in the BCorp self assessment

We are business members of Cornwall Wildlife Trust and support many other local and national charities, including the local youth group, the Railway Children, and Livewire Youth Music (where Lizzy volunteers each week as a music teacher).

Location

Facilities

Trackside views
Excellent access to trains
Woodburning stove
Games room, laundry, table tennis and swing ball
Access to ten acres of private woodland
Discount for guests arriving by train.
Eco-friendly accommodation
Welcome pack with fresh home-grown flowers
Pet friendly

Awards

Cornwall Sustainability Awards 2023 – Most Sustainable Small Business
Green Acorn Award 2024
Quality in Tourism Award 2024
Cornwall Tourism Awards 2022/3 – Silver Award for Accessibility , Bronze for Wildlife Friendly
Winner of the iTravel Staycation Award 2021 Self-Catering Holiday Category
South West Tourism Awards 2019 – Gold for Glamping
South West Tourism Awards 2019 – Silver for Responsible and Ethical Tourism
Cornwall Tourism Awards 2018 – Winner of Winners
Cornwall Tourism Awards 2018 – Gold for Responsible, Ethical and Sustainable Tourism, Gold for Glamping, Bronze for Accessibility and a Highly Commended for Wildlife Friendly Tourism.
South East Cornwall in Bloom 2018, 2017 and 2016 – Most Wildlife Friendly Garden
Visit England National Awards 2016 – Gold for Sustainable Tourism
We have also won several other awards prior to this in the Cornwall and South West Tourism Awards, and also the Cornwall Sustainability Award for Best Managed Small Business in 2013