Rail

St Neots Railway Station
St Neots railway station is served by generally half hourly trains north to Peterborough and south to Horsham via London St Pancras and Gatwick Airport, with additional peak time commuter services in the mornings and evenings to and from London King’s Cross. Journeys are typically around 45 minutes to London King’s Cross, 55 minutes to St Pancras, and a little under two hours to Gatwick Airport.

St Neots was the 423rd busiest station in the UK in 2018-19 with 1.3 million journeys beginning or ending there. St Neots station footbridge has access to the car park and taxi rank on the west side, and the district of Love’s Farm on the east side. There are lifts to the platforms.

There is a proposal to open a west to east rail link between Bedford and Cambridge. This is expected to have a station immediately south of St Neots where the new line and the existing main line will intersect. The proposal is under consultation at present (2021).

Road
St Neots lies adjacent to the A1 trunk road which links the town by road with London and the northeast of England and Scotland. The town is also linked with Cambridge to the east by the A428 road and Bedford and Milton Keynes by the A421 road at Black Cat Roundabout on the A1 just south of the town.

Six miles to the north the A14 trunk road provides westward and eastward access to the Midlands and East Anglia respectively. Historically the Great North road which forms the A1 passed through Eaton Socon until new alignment of the A1 road, forming a bypass, opened in 1971.

The A45 road between St Neots and Cambridge passed through the town centre until the three-mile St Neots Bypass opened in December 1985 (subsequently re-designated as the A428 road). There is major scheme for a new road connecting the Black Cat Roundabout and the A428 at Caxton Gibbet, avoiding St Neots completely. A £507 million contract has been awarded to Skanska for the construction.

Bus
St Neots is served by the Stagecoach 905 service which operates between St Neots Bus Station and Cambridge Parkside on a typically half-hourly basis. In addition Stagecoach operate a route 66 between St Neots and Huntingdon via Hinchingbrooke Hospital, on a typically hourly frequency six days a week.

Whippet Bus Company operates a 61/63 circular service between the town centre, Eaton Ford, Eaton Socon, Eynesbury, and the railway station, on a typically hourly frequency with some additional journeys, six days a week.

Air
St Neots is within an hour’s drive from London Luton Airport and London Stansted Airport, and has a direct train service to London Gatwick Airport.

Cycling
St Neots is on Route 12 of the Sustrans national cycle route that connects Colchester and Oxford via Harwich, Felixstowe, Ipswich, Bury St Edmunds, Cambridge, Huntingdon, Sandy, St Neots and Milton Keynes.

A foot and cycle bridge across the River Great Ouse was opened in 2011,[60] linking Eaton Socon and Eynesbury, enabling pupils attending Ernulf Academy to avoid cycling through the town centre and improving connections to existing cycle paths. The scheme was a Sustrans Connect2 project, and supported by Cambridgeshire County Council and Huntingdonshire District Council.

St Neots is just over 49 miles north of Charing Cross, London. It is close to the south-western boundary of Huntingdonshire District, and both the city of Cambridge (about 18 miles east) and Bedford (about 13 miles east) are nearby. The major shopping and employment centre of Milton Keynes is 31 miles to the west. Peterborough is 29 miles to the north.

Eaton Socon Lock
St Neots lies in the valley of the River Great Ouse, partly on the flood plain and partly on slightly higher ground a little further from the water. The Great Ouse is a mature river, once wide and shallow but now controlled by weirs and sluices and usually constrained in a well-defined channel.

River Great Ouse, St Neots
Tributaries entering the Great Ouse in the town are the River Kym, Hen Brook, Duloe Brook and Colmworth Brook. The area is generally low-lying. Riverside Park, an amenity adjacent to St Neots Bridge, remains set aside as a flood-meadow, subject to flood, protecting dwellings and commercial property from a swollen reach.

St Neots developed at the site of a ford where overland routes converged. This was replaced by a medieval bridge, and today there are two further crossings just outside the town, one to the north and another to the south.

The soil is mainly light, overlying gravel beds – gravel extraction is a local industry. Older disused gravel pits, such as the nearby Paxton Pits and Wyboston Leisure Park, have been converted to nature reserves and amenity areas. Away from the river, the higher land is mainly a heavy clay soil with few large settlements. Much of the land is used for arable farming.