Badly by rail, adequately by road, and better than expected by fibre. The branch line closed in the sixties and never came back, so trains play essentially no part in daily life here. Almost six in ten people drive to work, and roughly one in five never leaves the house to do it. Nearly every property can get superfast broadband. Callington is a town that solved its connection problem with a router rather than a timetable.
There is no railway. The branch line serving the town shut in 1966, and rail accounts for a fraction of one percent of journeys to work, which is what happens when the nearest platform is somebody else's parish. Buses exist in the geographic sense: 39 stops sit within the town's area, and about 1% of commutes are made on them.
What people actually do is drive. Around 59% of residents travel to work by car, about 19% work from home, and roughly 14% walk, which for a town this compact is a respectable number. Car ownership tells the same story from the other end. Roughly 16% of households run no car at all, while about 40% run two or more. In a place where the second car is the default rather than the indulgence, the household that manages without one has usually made a deliberate decision about where to live.
For everyday journeys, the Department for Transport's modelled statistics put the nearest town centre at about 7 minutes by car, 10 minutes by public transport, 10 minutes by bicycle and 14 minutes on foot. Those are modelled for the area rather than measured from any particular front door, and they date from 2019, so the public transport figures deserve more scepticism than the car and walk times. Bus services get withdrawn. Roads stay where they are.
The same source puts a doctor's surgery at about 8 minutes by car, 13 by public transport and 17 on foot. A food shop is roughly 7 minutes by car and 13 minutes walking, which is the single most useful number on this page for anyone weighing up whether they could live here without driving daily. Employment centres sit about 13 minutes away by car and roughly 33 by public transport. The hospital is the outlier and the one that should shape your thinking: about 35 minutes by car, and about 93 minutes by public transport. An hour and a half each way to a hospital bed is not a statistic, it is a logistics problem, and it is the reason older buyers here hold onto the car licence longer than they otherwise might.
Current service data, which is more reliable than the modelled figures, covers 25 of the town's stops. Those average around 32 scheduled departures on a weekday, with about 2 buses in the peak hour, and roughly 84% of stops carry some weekend service. Two an hour at the busiest time of day is a service you plan your life around rather than one you turn up and use.
Broadband is where the town quietly outperforms its road access. Roughly 96% of premises can get superfast, about 74% can get gigabit, and nothing sits below the universal service obligation minimum. Mobile coverage is close to complete, with about 100% of the area covered by at least one operator and roughly 95% covered by all of them, so the network you already pay for will probably work.
On noise, roughly 59% of postcodes sit near or above 65 decibels for road noise, which is the level at which official mapping starts treating traffic as significant rather than background. The loudest band present reaches 70 decibels. That is the price of a town built where two main roads cross, and it varies enormously street by street. There is no rail noise at all, for the obvious reason.
Electric vehicle charging is thin. The area has 2 public charge points with 5 connectors between them, one of which is rapid. That makes charging something you schedule rather than something you do while picking up the shopping, and anyone going electric here should plan on a home charger being the actual solution.
Connectivity is the weak leg of the table. Broadband and mobile do their job well, but a town with no station, two buses in the rush hour and an hour and a half to a hospital by public transport is a town that hands you the car keys and wishes you luck.