In 2025 communities on both sides of the Channel celebrated the 200th Anniversary of this useful service. As part of the celebrations the Newhaven Enterprise Zone published a comprehensive report outlining the importance of this service to the local and regional economy. All stakeholders recognise the potential to develop the market for foot passengers on this crossing. Foot passengers are also allowed to disembark before any road vehicles are allowed off the ferry. The current service is run by DFDS under a contract with the French Region of Seine Maritime, which is due to run for another 6-7 years. Most daytime crossings take about 4 hours with night time crossings taking about 5 hours.

I used this service to travel fom Brighton to Paris & back using mid-week day time crossings in February. At both ferry terminals and on the ships there was an array of “heritage” posters which had been used to promote this crossing over the years. Many of these posters show a full timetable and fares for a Rail/Sea/Rail journey from London to Paris & return. For many years this was the fastest way from London to Paris until the advent of faster air services. It is somewhat ironic that such a journey is now slower in 2026 and cannot be booked with just one ticket from a UK rail station.

Transfer between the Newhaven Town station and the ferry is easy and only a few minutes walk, with trains running to/from from Brighton, & Lewes every 30 mins most of the time 7 days a week. Once in the terminals you can find information about the connecting bus service to the station at Dieppe. However, once on the ferry there is no information about this useful service, nor is it mentioned over the PA when foot passengers are invited to disembark. NOTE: We have recently raised this issue with DFDS, who have agreed to investigate.

Once at Dieppe, the connecting bus generally leaves the ferry terminal about 30 minutes after the ship has docked. It costs only a few Euros and takes about 10 minutes to reach the station. It is also a reasonably pleasant 35 minute walk as an alternative, so long as you do not have heavy luggage.

Unfortunately, as French Railways(SNCF) do not run a regular interval service from Dieppe to Rouen 7 days a week, the trains do not always connect with the shuttle bus & ferry. The service varies and is less frequent on Saturdays and varies again on Sundays.This effectively undermines the benefit of the connecting bus service if passengers are faced with longer than necessary waits in Dieppe. Once in Rouen you can change onto a regular non-stop service to Paris which runs every hour or so. There is also a semi-fast service from Rouen to Paris which runs about every 2 hours or so stopping at about 6 statins on the way. I can also recommend Rouen as a pleasant & interesting stop-over on the way to Paris.

Finally, I noticed that Bi-mode trains are now used on some of the local Rouen-Dieppe services. With a bit of imagination on behalf of SNCF they could run a through Dieppe to Paris service(as they did many years ago) once or twice a day designed to connect with the ferries. It may not cost very much as all they need to do is link up a semi-fast Paris-Rouen service with a local Rouen-Dieppe service using their nice new bi-mode trains.

Nigel Perkins