When Can I Travel to JB by Train?

Over the past few days, I’ve been doing Google searches on how to cross the Malaysian border from Singapore in the most time-efficient manner. This is because I’ve been planning to go to Johor Bahru, which is commonly abbreviated as JB, for a little vacation in the near future.

Many Singaporeans travel there for vacation, doing things like shopping, dining, golfing, and massaging, as prices are much cheaper on the other side of the border, thanks to the favorable Singapore Dollar-Malaysian Ringgit exchange rate.

Even though I’m not much of a shopper, I do like to have a nice hotel stay for a day or two, where I can forget about doing household chores like cooking, cleaning, and washing. I also enjoy a full-body massage session every once in a while.

Nevertheless, were I to stay at a decent hotel in Singapore, it would easily set me back hundreds of dollars. Since JB is only a short bus ride away from here, I thought maybe I could travel there and do all the fun things at half the price of Singapore.

It certainly sounds like a good plan, but there is one catch - while JB is right next to Singapore, we can’t ignore the fact that border-crossing can be quite a hassle, taking two hours or even longer during peak periods. Therefore it’s imperative that I find a way to shorten the journey time should I decide to travel to JB.

The way things stand now, it seems that the fastest way I can cross the border is by train, which runs from Woodlands in Singapore to JB Sentral. The train ride only takes five minutes. Including the time needed to clear immigration and customs, you can cross the border within 30 minutes, considerably shorter than if you travel by bus, which is inevitably affected by traffic congestions and is therefore unpredictable.

The bad news is that the train tickets are extremely hard to come by, since the trains do not run frequently enough. I’ve learned to my dismay that for weekends, tickets up to two months in advance have been sold out, leaving me with no other choice but to travel by bus.

That’s too bad, but since I’m not in a hurry to travel to JB, maybe I should just book the tickets for a weekend in November, and wait out the intervening period patiently. Who knows, I might enjoy JB even more after being made to wait three months for that train ride!