Road, yes. Rail, not since 1968. The Cuckoo Line closed in the Beeching cuts and never reopened. Nearest stations are at Polegate, Pevensey, and Berwick. About one in a hundred residents commutes by train. Just over one in five works from home, which is the share keeping the missing station from breaking daily life.
Public transport is the thinnest part of the picture. The town itself has no railway station. The Cuckoo Line that once connected it to Polegate, Tunbridge Wells and a working passenger service lost its passenger trains in 1965 and finally went altogether in 1968 after a road vehicle damaged a bridge at Horsebridge and the line's owner decided not to repair it. The southern section of the disused line is now the Cuckoo Trail, which is excellent for a Saturday cycle and useless for getting to work. The nearest active stations are at Polegate, Berwick, Pevensey & Westham, and Pevensey Bay on the coastal line. About one in a hundred residents commutes by train, which is roughly what you would expect from a town where the train requires a drive or a bus before it can even start. Buses are present but not dominant. There are around 107 stops across the area, with services running into Eastbourne, Brighton, Lewes, Bexhill and Uckfield via the surrounding network. The share of residents commuting by bus is about the same as the rail share, which is to say barely anyone.
Broadband is where the town quietly catches up. Around three in five postcodes can get a gigabit connection. The superfast tier reaches almost everywhere, with effectively none of the town stuck below the official baseline. For anyone working from home, the connectivity question that matters is the one Hailsham answers well. The fibre rollout has done what the railway used to do, which is to make the town possible for people whose jobs do not require them to physically be somewhere else.
The practical consequence is that Hailsham is a drive-and-broadband town. Three in five take the car to work. Just over one in five work from home, a share that the broadband infrastructure now reliably supports. Around 7% walk to work, mostly into the town centre, which is reachable by car in about eight minutes from most of the surrounding postcodes, by public transport in around thirteen minutes, and on foot in about fifteen minutes from the residential edges. Anyone whose job is in Eastbourne or along the coast will find the daily commute by car or train-after-drive entirely manageable. Anyone whose job is in London should plan on driving to Polegate or Berwick and accepting that door-to-door becomes what door-to-door always becomes when the door is not next to a railway station.
An average verdict is the honest one. The roads work. The broadband works. The trains exist, just not here. Hailsham is well connected if you drive or work remotely, and poorly connected if you need to step out of your front door onto a platform.