Online train ticket purchasing

What’s the best website for getting a good price on a train ticket?

I need to get one for thursday evening, for a journey that uses 3 different train companies, and the tube. None of the different websites seem to find all the best connecting trains, so I’m not sure they’re ofering the best overall price, which varies from £50 to £65. Is there a site that will definately get me the best deal?

Or am I best off buying from the station?

Book ahead if you can. I usually just book on thetrainline if I’m booking ahead of time. If not, I just buy at the station.

When you are looking at train prices on thetrainline.com, click on the small text which says “Results are based on the fastest available trains. Click here to check if slower routes with cheaper tickets are available.”

Then work your way down the ticket list, clicking on “Check for Trains” on each box. Sometimes you’ll get a route which is only slightly longer, but significantly cheaper. Works for me a lot doing Glasgow – Leeds (by using the Via Appleby route, which never shows up otherwise.

I always use National Rail Enquiries:

http://ojp.nationalrail.co.uk/service/planjourney/search

I tend to use eastcoast, as they’ve never charged a card processing fee and they have a rewards programme. They are all much of a muchness, just watch out for the fees at the end, there are plenty free options.

eastcoast failed to see my local connection. doh!
So went to the station, bought ticket for as cheap as i can get online.
Bizarely, their reservation system, and all the online ones, are saying it’l take 1hr 20 to get from Kings Cross to Liverpool Street. I’d be better off walking

buy from the station? you must be joking.

i.e. for me to get train to london, by standard class no reserve, tomorrow so <24hrs notice.

Online, not even the cheapest, just any old = £60-120 return
online a month in advance, = £40-60.
online 3months in advance = £20
at the train station on the day = £510

Yes, FIVE HUNDRED+
I could go and hire a BMW 7series, drive it like a dick to london, park it wherever, stop in a decent hotel with decent dinner and breakfast, then drive it back like I stole it and still be about £50-100 up.

Public transport in UK = jokes

Brickman, it’s worked on the basis that those with the least flexible travel plans will also be those with the deepest pockets (i.e. business travellers).

How many leisure travellers just wander into a train station in the morning and think, hmmm, i’ll jump on a train to somewhere 300 miles away today?

You wouldn’t expect to get a cheap flight by turning up at the airport on the day, so why a train?

Not saying I think that £500 for a train ticket is acceptable, but by charging buiness users high fares, it “should” mean better fares for leisure travellers who can plan ahead.

It used to be £380 for a train ticket for me from Leeds to London (that’s a 2 hour 15 minute journey). I’d never pay that for personal travel, but work didn’t seem to care since clients were always paying.

Brickman, you missed a couple of details:

I need to get one for thursday evening

So went to the station, bought ticket for as cheap as i can get online.

Standard single on local connections at either end, and Advance with reserved seat for the mainline journey Newcastle – London. Trainline.com wouldn’t give me the options for Advance tickets and wanted £135, I just paid £66.

All the sites are equally crap as they are all based on the same search engine which is run by National Rail Enquiries (which is a JV of all the private train companies set up as a condition of privatisation to give timetable information to the public).

So to find the cheapest option you are buggered, its impossible without loads of manual checking of all of the avilable options which could number into the 100s.

Once you find the ticket you want then book it via comeone who doesn’t charge a booking or CC fee. I use cross country as they allow you to book multiple tickets on one transaction which is often necessary to get the cheapest fares.

You can see the logic to the pricing system, but it needs a better search engine to stop people missing the cheapest fares.

Brickman, it’s worked on the basis that those with the least flexible travel plans will also be those with the deepest pockets (i.e. business travellers).

How many leisure travellers just wander into a train station in the morning and think, hmmm, i’ll jump on a train to somewhere 300 miles away today?

I travel to Antwerp for work a fair bit. I fly into Amsterdam and get the Thalys train to Antwerp.

I’ll book a single from Antwerp to Amsterdam in advance, sometimes a few weeks, sometimes a couple of months. It costs about €70. I don’t book the Amsterdam to Antwerp ticket in advance in case of flight delays and I miss the train I’ve booked.

However when I land in Schipol I walk out the airport and buy my single in the station, and it costs me exactly the same as the ticket I booked in advance.

No bending over and shafting you because you have the bare faced cheek to not book in advance. The trains are clean, fast and scarily efficient.

Train travel in this country is a joke.

“Train travel in this country is a joke.”

Never mind it’ll all be sorted soon with what Cameron describes as “the biggest infrastructure investment in the railways since the Victorians”.

Oh how we laugh.

irbandito – 1 hour 20 between Kings Cross and Liverpool Street? Don’t see that’s far off the mark. I do that journey everyday as part of my commute and if it’s a hot/wet/cold/cool/misty/sunny/clear/foggy/day-ending-in-a-y day then there will be the usual chaos and it’ll probably take longer.

In fact, I’m off later to brave it. I’m just going out for a while, I may be some time.

Thetrainline.com is a nice website for searching, but they charge a booking fee at the checkout

I used redspottedhanky.com the other day who don’t charge any extras

They also let.you spend clubcard points there which are worth double, but it takes a day for it to go through

You can also get cheaper fares by booking one journey on separate tickets, even if you stay on the same train. Doesn’t always work out cheaper, but I have saved a lot in the past doing that

Always try splitting tickets for long journeys

Looked at doing the separate journeys – added up to £85.

And its never 1:20 to get from Kings Cross to Liverpool Street. Not at 10:30pm when I’ll be doing it.

“Train travel in this country is a joke.”

Never mind it’ll all be sorted soon with what Cameron describes as “the biggest infrastructure investment in the railways since the Victorians”.

Oh how we laugh.

10years ago a Japanese fella said he could build a full maglev in addition to the mainline (so not affecting it too badly during construction) from London to Glasgow for £9.8bn
They laughed him out of the room.

10 years later, they’ve spent over £12bn just fixing up the west coast mainline to the standard it was touching on in the late 1980s (or thereabouts)

Yeah I realise they put a heavy £££ emphasis on ‘now’ travel and thats fair enough, but what really gets me is the con nature of buying tickets.
So I jump on a train from home to Glasgow, I know as a fact I have to buy the two tickets for the branch line, then mainline seperately despite what the ticket man will say. Price difference (bought on the day of travel)
open return right through = £60
day return for each portion = £47.50 (ish)
open return for each portion = £21.50 + £11.65 = erm, £30 somthing?

Confused? yeah much! I guess the reason is the ticket will say something like ‘point a to point b by any means within 1month’, but then, so do the two separate tickets. In more built up regions in the UK I could maybe see the benefit of the full open return, but generally people get ripped every day when they don’t have to.

My GF making the same journey from a slightly different starting station was DEMANDED to buy the through ticket at the higher price as she ‘wouldn’t be allowed to be in the station without an onwards ticket’ or some such grade A. It really pissed me off, two reasons
1) the ticket guy was blatantly taking advantage of a person who wasn’t that familiar with the way trains work.
2) I bought the onward ticket for her at the next station/part of the journey in the ticket booth as had been told can’t get them on trains any more, or its an offense? So qued for 20mins, got the ticket, neary missed the train (gf arrived in mean time and qued with me), then when we got on train, uh oh, we both have tickets for her. Then took about 2weeks+ to get money back for extra ticket. All because couldn’t buy ticket on the train.

Bugger it, I’ll just drive everywhere, its borderline cheaper, 5000% less stressful, and I can take my bike***

***try taking a bike on a virgin train, even when you’ve booked/rang some Indian call centre for a reference number that means bugger all when you get to the platform and the guard informs you the train is full and please kindly go away/wait 90mins for another which ‘might’ have some space.
/mega coffee fueled rant over.

OK. Between 6pm – 7pm it bloody is!