Buying train tickets online.

[JZ]

Got to watch what I say here.

 

As a guard with TOC I see many tickets that passengers have purchased online. Many have made substantial savings, which I think is great, as it dispels the myth, perpetuated by the press, that train travel is expensive. However there is one of these online sites that I find people have either paid the walk-on price, or in one case, a great deal more. I won't name them, but their advertising show people going crazy when the learn how much they could have saved. In reality it is the other way around. This one case in particular was a journey for 12,  on saver returns, all travelling together on both legs. They had paid a total of £211.20 for their journey. If they had bought them on the train, they would have paid £105.60.(£17.60 each on group 4 saver(4 for 2) = 12 x £8.80) I couldn't even find the fare they were supposed to have made a saving against. The journey in question was between a country junction station, think Glastonbury, and a seaside resort in a county between Hants and Devon, nor far from Tolmouth.

 

So if any of you non-railway folk wish to buy tickets, I suggest you go to one of the TOCs own websites(and it doesn't have to be the one that carries you).

[Gwiwer]

Ticketing is an absolute minefield as many of us know.  As fast as some edict tries to make it simpler (think "Ordinary" / "Cheap Day" / "Weekend" / "Saver" / "APEX" morphing into "Anytime" / "Advance") out comes something to make it "cheaper" yet introducing more complexity.

 

I am, as many members here will know, based outside the UK but make fairly frequent trips on British railways.  I pre-plan and pre-book what I can by using Network Rail's "cheapest fare finder", then their "normal" journey planner linking to fares, then cross-checking the major TOC for their best fare and then checking one or two others where bargains sometimes lurk such as Southern for an all-First Great Western journey.

 

I don't claim to always find the cheapest fare but I do claim to have spent a few minutes saving myself hundreds of Pounds.  Even without the possibility of split ticketing I have been able to find an £18 Penzance - Brighton fare (booked with Southern but using all FGW trains) when the primary TOC wouldn't come below £82.  Southern themselves offer some in-house bargains including the Downlander ticket which is effectively a one-day rover for all their trains, plus the Lewes - Uckfield bus link.  The only trouble is that you have to book online and must have a UK-based card to pay with.  They won't accept overseas cards and you can't buy the ticket as a walk-up.  Luckily I have a UK-addressed card in my wallet!

 

It pays to shop around and ask around.  And just as it has done for years it pays to be flexible with plans when you can.  The most direct / quickest route isn't always the cheapest.  Compare London - Birmingham fares on Virgin and Chiltern for example.  Or just about any cross-country journey by avoiding direct and XC trains entirely.  Plymouth - Sheffield is often cheaper via London and sometimes just as quick as via "Not London"

[great central]

As far as I can figure out it's because they ask the 'system' for return tickets, the 'system' isn't set up for returns only single journeys.

I had something similar a couple of years back. When they entered their journey requirements, it defaults to a single journey (one way), so my couple thought that was all they could buy and bought two singles when they could have bought CDRs on the day. Cost them nearly double.

Mine were going from a large county town where the station is undergoing a few alterations to a seaside town somewhere between the Humber and the Wash. 

[Poggy1165]

Ah, how grateful I am we have moved on from the old days when one had to ask a booking clerk at the station for 'single', 'cheap day return', 'ordinary return' or '17 day return' all of which were sold at a fixed price. How on earth did with we use to manage with such a bizarre system?

[The Stationmaster]

Ah, how grateful I am we have moved on from the old days when one had to ask a booking clerk at the station for 'single', 'cheap day return', 'ordinary return' or '17 day return' all of which were sold at a fixed price. How on earth did with we use to manage with such a bizarre system?

Simple really - any decent Booking Clerk would ask you when you intended to make your return journey and then try to find you the cheapest fare.  equally if you were enquiring in advance any good Booking or Enquiry Clerk would do their best to lead to the best fare for you depending on the circumstances of your intended trip.

 

However it would only be fair to point out that some Booking and Enquiry Clerks were not of the best and might not be as helpful or knowledgeable as their better colleagues and dealing with 'the public' can at times be amazingly trying and wearing.

[Neil]

Fortunately we still have excellent booking office staff at my local station Machynlleth. They search out the best fares but go much further in delivering an excellent service. However if you're not blessed with such splendid local staff or if internet booking is your preference can I put in a mention for 'The Man in Seat Sixty-One' who gives excellent advice for travel both within the UK and further afield.

[meil]

I will give you another online example (with Snr rail card). Put in Wolverhampton to Sittingbourme return - £145. Now put in W'ton - London return £30 and then London - Sittingbourne - £15 = total £45.

 

The nice lady at W'ton knew what she was about and gave me the £45 return.

[45156]

My neice had to travel back from Lancaster to Lewes unexpectedly, and the best that her chosen provider could come up with was over £100.

 

A quick search of the individual journeys via the TOCs' own websites got her a first class single Lancaster - Euston for about £50 and an advance single Victoria - Lewes for a fiver!

[roundhouse]

I generally use National Rail website to check fares. I always look at other fares using the tab next to each fare.

 

I will then look at the relevant TCS website incase they have any special offers.

 

Ian

[Derekl]

I buy at the ticket office, where in York (where I lived until recently) I always had good excellent service, and not much different now in Dorridge.

 

I try and avoid the machines in the ticket offices, having managed to buy the wrong ticket on more than one occasion (OK, probably dopey on my part), but I did notice at the "new" Birmingham New Street, there is not a great deal of personal service available, and hordes of machines, one of which I had to use recently. I checked the fare on the National Rail web-site and just selected that one.

 

I am personally not that keen on train specific advance purchases - I can too easily see where that can go expensively wrong, although I am aware that many find them useful, and they do afford major savings.

 

If you are crossing London and use two tickets, that is to/from London, you also get to pay the additional tube fare (£4 each way, unless you have an Oyster, when I think it is £2 each way), although that does not exactly factor into the massive differences above. (If you have a senior railcard, you may also have a local bus pass, so could do it by bus - a bit slowly - for zilch).

 

It does occur to me that if you get a train specific "to London" ticket, and separate train specific "from London" to your destination and the "to London" goes wrong, so you can't make the train specific "from London", then you could have a problem (if they bother to check the tickets - my experience on South Eastern, Southern and Thameslink (as was) is that it is unlikely).

[QWILPEN]

For last years Warley show I checked online ( national rail ) for the basic fare I was going to pay then shoppped around a bit and ended up buying my tcket online via Southern , but I liked to thier web site via Quidco and got additional cash back as well.

 

no part of the journey was with southern, there are bargains to be found.

 

 

Steve

[PhilH]

I can't be bothered, wish it was as easy as buying German rail tickets (online from here)

[Adams442T]

I normally use East Coast when travelling to London [with Snr. Rail Card] and travel First Class with reserved seats, tea & buns on the way down and the same plus a meal on the way back, for less than the 2nd Class fare!

 

Jane & I recently used them for a First Class return trip to Edinburgh for a few days.  Excellent service, same reserved seating, plenty of food and drinks served both ways and it cost us £78.40!

[Michael Delamar]

can someone answer a question ive always wondered..

if you buy a ticket between 2 towns or cities where you could use more than one route and train company, how do they know which company to give the money to?

[Gwiwer]

 

so you can't make the train specific "from London", then you could have a problem (if they bother to check the tickets - my experience on South Eastern, Southern and Thameslink (as was) is that it is unlikely).

 

 

I found, when faced with this kind of problem, that the barrier-line gates would not open if a train-specific ticket was inserted after the scheduled departure time.  My scenario was that the specific train was actually cancelled and I was therefore permitted by default to use the next available service but no-one had told the barriers that!  

[chrisf]

It's worth investing some time on the net when planning a journey.  I have managed to secure advance tickets from Milton Keynes to Urmston and back [yes, ExpoEM North, this means you] for £7.25 each way.  The penalties are an early start, not that I mind the fresh morning air you understand, and a return via Warrington because the maximum saving was not available via Manchester.  The walk across Warrington from Central to Bank Quay will doubtless be beneficial and bracing, which is just as well as there appears to be no connecting bus.

 

Michael's point about apportioning fares between TOCs is a good one.  As the fare to Urmston is the same as to Manchester I am doing Northern a favour, even if it is only a few pence.

 

When I made this booking I started with the National Rail Enquiries site, which seems to have been tweaked to allow easy selection of railcards on the first pass, although when I cluck on Senior it seemed to prefer the Network Card setting and I had to do it again!  Once I had selected the bargains NRE redirected me to the Virgin site to make the booking.  I was even able to specify that I would collect the tickets from the machine at my local station rather than risk a malfunction at Milton Keynes on the day.  All this can be very simple once you get the hang of it BUT I would rather that airline methods did not spead any further to the railways. Impulse travel comes at too high a price.

 

Gwiwer's experience with ticket gates is not one that I have had but I must have had most of the rest. I don't know whether ATOC realise but the magnetic strip on the back of the ticket is supposed to tell the barrier to open.  It is nonnsensical that a one day Travelcard purchased on a Saturday would not open the gates on the then new East London line, the Southern side at Victoria or even at my home station of Bedford!  At Milton Keynes my advance ticket seldom makes the barriers function and I have to ask the human standing next to it to work it for me.  The answers to the question "why" have been many and varied but are uniformly BS, which does not in this instance stand for brake second.  There are many stations where the barriers are left open because there is no-one to man them. If they need to be manned  then let us have the man and get rid of the scrap metal and its attendant grief!

 

Chris

[roundhouse]

Re one comment above, buying a ticket from London to a destination on the same TOC and separate tickets across London and the other side can often be far far cheaper than a through ticket. However whrn we do this we try to build in a bit of extra time by catching an earlier trainas a fail safe although quite often early on a Saturday morning even this can go horribly wrong. This happened to us a year or do ago when Southern decided to reroute the London bound service to Tonbridge from Redhill and the next one then got delayed on its way to Redhill and thrn sat outside London Bridge for another five minutes or more!

I find that booking tickets online is far easier than all the different TOC set up self service machines although collecting the tickets from these is fine as long as you don't try to collect the Southern Day save tickets from them as their booking code is a different number of characters.

The

Ian

[Edwin_m]

can someone answer a question ive always wondered..

if you buy a ticket between 2 towns or cities where you could use more than one route and train company, how do they know which company to give the money to?

The seller of any ticket gets some commission, which is how booking websites can exist without charging booking fees (though some charge booking fees anyway!). 

 

For the remainder of the price the split goes according to the type of ticket. 

 

Walk-up (Anytime or Off-Peak) revenue is shared out between the TOCs who could have provided the journey, according to a computer model known as ORCATs which predicts the proportion of travellers on each fare who will be using each of the possible routes/TOCs, based on the timetable and people's likely behaviour and calibrated from time to time by passenger surveys.  Hence some train services are known as "ORCATS raids" where a TOC runs into someone else's territory, probably doesn't carry many passengers in reality but hopes to get a large slice of the revenue for the route due to the peculiarities of the model. 

 

For Advance tickets where only one TOC is involved, that TOC gets all the money (except the seller's commission, if they weren't the seller).  This partly explains why TOCs are so keen on pushing these products, and sometimes seem to be fighting over slices of the cake rather than trying to make the cake bigger! 

 

I don't know exactly what happens when an Advance involves travelling on more than one TOC but I would assume the fare is split between them.

[The Stationmaster]

 

 

Gwiwer's experience with ticket gates is not one that I have had but I must have had most of the rest. I don't know whether ATOC realise but the magnetic strip on the back of the ticket is supposed to tell the barrier to open.  It is nonnsensical that a one day Travelcard purchased on a Saturday would not open the gates on the then new East London line, the Southern side at Victoria or even at my home station of Bedford!  At Milton Keynes my advance ticket seldom makes the barriers function and I have to ask the human standing next to it to work it for me.  The answers to the question "why" have been many and varied but are uniformly BS, which does not in this instance stand for brake second.  There are many stations where the barriers are left open because there is no-one to man them. If they need to be manned  then let us have the man and get rid of the scrap metal and its attendant grief!

 

Chris

The ticket operated gates are one of the more peculiar aberrations of the disintegrated railway.  

 

For convenience I happen to have a rather handy credit card sized piece of plastic known as a Gate Pass which was issued by FGW and will accordingly operate the gates at 'their' stations (well it has at the ones I've tried so far).  But in the cock-eyed way things are now arranged it will not, for example, operate the gates at Cardiff General Central because that station is 'operated' by Arriva - notwithstanding its heavy usage by FGW passengers.  

 

In contrast the Oyster Card is a much more effective thing and I have only once had a problem with it activating a barrier - works like a dream on London 'buses too.

[Gwiwer]

ORCATS apportions the revenue

 

 

 

I don't know exactly what happens when an Advance involves travelling on more than one TOC but I would assume the fare is split between them.

 

ORCATS apportions the revenue via a hugely complex formula.

 

Raiding is a little less common perhaps than it once was and not necessarily for reasons directly attributed to revenue.  For example SWT used to run regularly to Paignton and weekly to Penzance meaning they could have a slice of both revenue pies via ORCATS.  That they no longer run at all west of Exeter is due to their needing as much of their rolling stock as possible for the new(ish) hourly service thence to London.  That said a unit which used to be detached at Salisbury and sit idle awaiting a later up working now runs north to Bristol fulfilling known demand on a busy route and no doubt tapping into ORCATS into the bargain!

[Xerces Fobe2]

Beware when using thetrainline.com.as there is a booking charge at the end of the transaction and with an offer that looks like a for a 10% discount on your next journey. It is indeed that however if you say accept the offer yiou card details are used to populate an application for an online discount shopping company which charges you a £10 monthly membership fee via a direct debit which you do not realise you have signed up yo until it is too late!

 

This online discount shopping company uses the same tactic concert ticket purchase websites too! Whist this practice is not illegal it is somewhat dubious and is aim is to deceive the unwary customer. I got caught however a following quick call tho the online discount shopping company concerned it was easy to cancel my membership at no cost.

 

I will however never use thetrainline.com again !

 

Nigel

[phil-b259]

Gwiwer's experience with ticket gates is not one that I have had but I must have had most of the rest. I don't know whether ATOC realise but the magnetic strip on the back of the ticket is supposed to tell the barrier to open.  It is nonnsensical that a one day Travelcard purchased on a Saturday would not open the gates on the then new East London line, the Southern side at Victoria or even at my home station of Bedford!  At Milton Keynes my advance ticket seldom makes the barriers function and I have to ask the human standing next to it to work it for me.  The answers to the question "why" have been many and varied but are uniformly BS, which does not in this instance stand for brake second.  There are many stations where the barriers are left open because there is no-one to man them. If they need to be manned  then let us have the man and get rid of the scrap metal and its attendant grief!

 

Chris

 

The problem is magnetic strips are 'old' technology. They cannot be made too 'strong' for want of a better word, or they will scramble the magnetic info on credit / debit cards when the they are placed in close proximity (although with chip and pin being the norm these days it is probably not such a risk as it once was). Also I have a feeling the very nature of the ticket - being card - does not help, and there is of course the issue that if the ticket printing / encoding machine is not working at 100% the 'strength' of the magnetic information is reduced making it more suseptable to degrading.

 

Oyster being a non contact device (a chip embedded in the plastic card that communicates with the gates when placed in the electric field generated by the gates themselves) doesn't have these problems. Of course the downside is that something like an oyster card is fairly expensive to produce compared to bits of card yet if the governments push for smartcard ticketing takes off a reusable Oyster style device which can be loaded up with your ticket might be benifical for regular users of the rail network.

[phil-b259]

Gwiwer's experience with ticket gates is not one that I have had but I must have had most of the rest. I don't know whether ATOC realise but the magnetic strip on the back of the ticket is supposed to tell the barrier to open.  It is nonnsensical that a one day Travelcard purchased on a Saturday would not open the gates on the then new East London line, the Southern side at Victoria or even at my home station of Bedford!  At Milton Keynes my advance ticket seldom makes the barriers function and I have to ask the human standing next to it to work it for me.  The answers to the question "why" have been many and varied but are uniformly BS, which does not in this instance stand for brake second.  There are many stations where the barriers are left open because there is no-one to man them. If they need to be manned  then let us have the man and get rid of the scrap metal and its attendant grief!

 

Chris

 

With the drive (from the DfT I hasten to add) to gate as many stations as possible, at the more minor ones the way round the need for an attendant is to place a camera equipped help point on the public side of the gateline linked to the booking office. Thus any ticketing issues (e.g. the gates won't allow the ticket presented) means the booking office staff can  view the ticket remotely and act accordingly (It does annoy them a bit sometimes when we keep having to buzz to let us back and forth while doing maintenance). This means you reduce the number of staff required to an acceptable level - Indeed at Reigate for example the gates are only left open when the staff are away from the ticket office. (Out of hours a proper gate is opened and the ticket barrier entrance gets closed off by shutters)

[Gwiwer]

Oyster isn't foolproof.  It allows you a change of mind and won't charge if you enter then leave the exact same location within a set time period (to allow, among other things, for you to walk away if the service is disrupted without charge or needing a human to open the gates) but once that time has elapsed I believe it applies a default fare assuming you have had time to make a short trip, fail to touch off and have returned to your point of origin.

 

Travelcard, the older mag-stripe version still widely used by day visitors, won't allow you to both enter and leave the same location at all without manual intervention.

 

On the occasion I had a problem gate staff were on hand to assist passengers due to there being moderate disruption to most services over an extended time with a few cancellations so I had no difficulty being let through once the gate had refused me entry on the perfectly reasonable grounds that my ticket was issued only for a 21.17 train and was being entered at 21.40 for the 21.47.  I have no idea how much time delay is built into the system (but assume some is) to allow for late running of the specified train in the normal order of things; in such cases a departure platform is not normally displayed at a London terminus until very shortly before the train is ready.

 

I encountered a similar issue with Travelcard trying to board the DC line train at Euston; LM have their barriers set to reject them because those same barriers admit one to the LM regional trains towards Northampton and Crewe but Travelcard is not valid beyond Harrow.  It is necessary to approach the attended gate and state your destination before being let through.

 

Back to online purchase as per OP I never ever use the trainline site; it seldom seems to provide the cheapest fare and there are potentially unwanted commercial issues not readily apparent to the user which have been touched on above.

[bbishop]

 

That said a unit which used to be detached at Salisbury and sit idle awaiting a later up working now runs north to Bristol fulfilling known demand on a busy route and no doubt tapping into ORCATS into the bargain!

Well, it's got my custom!  At least I can get half way to Temple Meads on a decent railway.

 

Bill