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Belfast’s new £340m transport hub, Grand Central Station, has opened to the public with the introduction of bus services. The station is expected to handle up to 20 million journeys annually, with trains expected to join the bus services by the end of October. While rail services may begin soon, to date, no exact date has been announced, with the site off Grosvenor Road in Belfast still requiring safety checks. The new transportation centre is located behind the previous central Belfast service stations, Great Victoria Street and the Europa Bus Centre, both of which are expected to shut down.
The new facility features more modern facilities than the previous transport stations and offers more frequent cross-border trains to Dublin. Amar Kumar became the first passenger to enter the station, commenting to reporters that he was “so lucky” and “probably I’ll be in the history books”. Another passenger, Kieran Doherty, remarked, “I’m acutely aware that this is a really historical event. Something good is happening. I’m retired, and every day I get the bus somewhere, to go somewhere and do something different. So I’ll be a regular here. It’s just historical, just to say that I was on the first bus out of the new station.”
Translink’s chief executive, Chris Conway, said that the station’s opening “went fantastic” and the new hub would help increase “connectivity across the island of Ireland with our new, hourly Enterprise service coming in later in the autumn and obviously all of our bus connections between Belfast and Dublin as well”. With plans for the new integrated station dating more than a decade, the pandemic and inflation had made project difficult but the doors opened on schedule; some surrounding streets will not always be accessible while public works continue, with the station set to be completed in 2024
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