Sway has its own railway station and almost nobody uses it. Fewer than two residents in a hundred commute by train, despite direct trains to London running from the village itself. Over four in ten work from home. Just under half drive to wherever they are going. The connection exists, in other words, and most of Sway has quietly decided it can take it or leave it.
The rail is the good news, and it is genuinely good news. Sway Rail Station sits in the village on a line with direct trains to London, which is a rarer thing for a New Forest village than the residents seem to treat it as. Around it, the wider network is close enough to matter: Brockenhurst, New Milton, and the two Lymington stops at Lymington Town and Lymington Pier are all within reach if the timetable at Sway does not suit. On paper this is a place well plugged into the railway. In practice, the share of people actually commuting by train sits under two in a hundred, which tells you most of the village either works locally, works from home, or has looked at the car and made peace with it. Buses fill in less of the gap than the map suggests. There are around twenty bus stops scattered across the area, but the number of people using the bus to get to work rounds down to almost nobody, well under one in a hundred. Twenty stops is a decent scatter of red poles. It is not the same as a service you would plan your morning around.
Where Sway does quietly deliver is the connection nobody has to catch a train for. Roughly nine in ten homes can get a gigabit broadband line, which for a village wrapped in national park is a better result than the tree cover would lead you to expect. That figure is the one doing the heavy lifting behind the four-in-ten who work from home. When the fastest way out of the village is a fibre cable rather than a platform, the broadband stops being a nice-to-have and starts being the actual commute.
Put together, getting about from Sway is a car-and-broadband arrangement with a railway line as a genuine backup rather than a daily habit. The train is there when you need London and the road is there for everything else, which is why just under half the working population drives and a large chunk simply logs on from home. This is not somewhere the bus reshapes your day or the station defines the village. It is somewhere the choices exist, and most people use one or two of them and ignore the rest. The type who needs a train every morning tends to find that out fast and either commits to the timetable or moves closer to a busier line.
Sway is decently connected, not brilliantly so. The station and the strong broadband keep it from feeling cut off, but the thin bus use and the reliance on the car mean this is a place you drive out of more often than you catch anything from. Handy enough for the occasional trip to London, dependent on four wheels for the daily grind.