Railholiday

Suitable For

Single people, couples, families, dog owners, wheelchair users, rail enthusiasts, walkers, people without a car and anyone who who wants a low-carbon holiday with a difference.

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.

Millpool, perfect for single guests and couples, is designed to be accessible for all, so is suited for both able bodied guests and those in wheelchairs. With wide doors and and an open plan design it has stunning views over the hills of South East Cornwall. Millpool is usually set up with a double bed, but a single profiling bed is available on request, and there is a single sofa bed in the lounge.

The cosy Old Luggage Van with wood-burner and double bed makes a super retreat for couples or single people. Its pretty, enclosed garden has a line-side position, so is great for rail enthusiasts.

Also good for rail enthusiasts and with fine views of the trains is the Travelling Post Office, where Michael Portillo stayed while making the first series of Great British Railway Journeys. Good for both couples and families, the Travelling Post Office has a wood burner, double bedroom and bunk room that’s perfect for children or agile adults.Because of their proximity to the track the Luggage Van and Travelling Post Office are particularly popular, so booking well in advance is advised.

Our carriage Mevy exudes Victorian splendour, with its first-class bedroom with gilded mahogany and maple panels and velvet upholstered walls. Children will love the old guard’s room that is now a fairy tale triple bedroom and everyone loves the roll top bath. Set below the station, Mevy has views of rolling countryside. Because we like to keep it as suitable as possible for allergy sufferers Mevy is pet free and, like Millpool, centrally heated by our biomass boiler.

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 and iTraveller Staycation of the Year in 2021. Guests have access to ten acres of woodland with snowdrops, wild garlic, bluebells and wild flowers, and there is a discount of £25 to anyone coming by train. There is a direct service to and from London and Bristol.

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 that will deliver food to your carriage at no extra cost, an excellent cafe and gift shop (as featured on Beyond Paradise) and a weekly wood fired pizza van. We are four miles from the nearest beach, with good public transport links to the fishing villages of Looe and Polperro.

Short breaks are available. We are open all year.
For more information please visit our website at www.railholiday.co.co.co.uk or like us on Facebook; www.facebook.com/Railholiday or Twitter @Railholiday.

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Sustainability

Railholiday have always been committed to being as sustainable as we possibly can be. We are currently working towards achieving net zero. Here are a few things that we do: We offer a local carbon 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. 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 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 also take part in campaigns for climate change, from processions 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, but because they all cost money have decided that we would rather use that money for business membership of Cornwall Wildlife Trust and supporting other local charities.

Location

Facilities

Eco-friendly
Dog friendly
Family friendly
Perfect for rail enthusiasts
Ten acres of private woodland to explore
Open all year
Unlimited Wifi
£50 discount for guests arriving by train or with a Cornwall or Devon address
Free to use car-charging point
Stunning south coast beaches from only four miles away.
Excellent rail service for exploring Cornwall and Devon
Picturesque riverside village with Port Eliot country estate on the doorstep

Awards

Cornwall Sustainability Awards 2023 – Most Sustainable Small Business
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 – Gold for 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