On this Friday the 24th of October, during the 1PM ceremony, I received my Joint Honours undergraduate degree in History and Spanish. During the four years of my studies, I commuted from Tullamore, from my parents’ house via train, because getting even digs in Dublin was not an option for me. I have saved most of the tickets that I used from the experience.
I got into Trinity College in the last round of CAO offers in October of 2021. I was not even sure that I would get in, so I had not made any arrangements for transport or accommodation. I did not yet have my driving licence, so my only option was public transport. Luckily, there is a train from Tullamore to Dublin, so that began my journey of going up and down every other day. As a student of History, I suppose I had an impulse to start saving my train tickets instead of throwing them out, to use as a primary source later.
Ferenc graduates, and the slogging routine of his daily commute is over.
During the first three semesters of college, I commuted every day I had classes, and afterwards I managed to secure a couch that I could occasionally surf on. So, the price of transportation from the spring semester of 2023 will be lower than if I had purely commuted, but I also went on Erasmus for the autumn semester of that year.
The cost to stay in Barcelona for my Erasmus semester was €1776.42 for the on-campus student accommodation at the Universitat Autonoma for four and a half months, mostly covered by the Erasmus grant, which was €1575. and I spent an additional amount of about €3,000 during my stay there for food, travel and entertainment, so the total cost for my Erasmus exchange out of pocket was €3201.42. This was an incredibly tight budget, so I would recommend saving up about €1000 more if you want to be comfortable for one semester.
In my last two and a half years I would say that I used the train about two-thirds as much as I would have, without the place where I was couch surfing. So, for the period between spring 2024 and 2025, consider that compared to using only the train to get to and from college, my numbers are deflated by a third.
Here is a breakdown of the numbers:
I took 110 train trips between October 2021 and the spring of 2022, for the total cost of €1119.04. Then they slashed the cost of student tickets by half in the autumn of 2022! Between that and the next price rise, in June of 2024, I took 166 train trips, for the price of €771.90. In June of 2024 my usual ticket price of €4.65 for a single trip went up by 20 cents to €4.85, which is still the price today. Between then and the end of my course in May of 2025, I took 139 trips, for the cost of €674.15. This makes the total amount that I paid for commuting to college €2565.09, or about two and a half months’ worth of the licence fee at Trinity Hall.
The cost of my degree that I paid out of pocket to Trinity College was €13,120.75. The rest was covered by SUSI, and the fee frees initiative. So, for anyone interested in how much it costs to commute for three and a half years and even squeeze in a semester for Erasmus, the total cost of doing so for me was €18,887.26 – but not counting anything beyond travel, Erasmus and tuition-related costs. If you sometimes like to have a toastie from the SU Café, that is going to go on top of that. I took the train from Tullamore to my graduation and posed with my stack of tickets in front of the Campanile for a photo. I would like to thank Iarnród Éireann for always being there for me, and for being cheaper than renting in Dublin.
