Train journey.

[BOB BLACKSHAW 1Participant @bobblackshaw1]

Hello.  This is a non engineering question but I need some help as booking a train journey has left me confused.

IMe and the wife are travelling to Chatham from Bedford return next week, looking on the Web sites a return is around £52 .Booking on line is the confusing part, if I pay via the computer how does the ticket system work. I won’t have a ticket, will the ticket be on the phone.  Two train operators EMR and Thames link, Thames link is the best with one change London Bridge, but one Web site states two train a day and another site states on the time table as frequently. I don’t want to pay up then I’ve made a mistake, any advice will be appreciated. If this works out I shall get a rail card.

Bob

[duncan webster 1Participant @duncanwebster1]

I just went on Trainline. Picked Tuesday at random. Tickets start at £20.60 (one way) depending on what time of day. 1 change at St. Pancras. Trains about every half hour. When I’ve booked online you get the option of picking tickets up from the machine at the station, or having them electronically. In the latter case I always print them off, don’t want to be reliant on mobile phones. However my son thinks I’m a dinosaur, he just waves his phone at the ticket barrier and it works. If you’re still struggling send me your email address by PM and I’ll screen shot it.

[BOB BLACKSHAW 1Participant @bobblackshaw1]

Thanks Duncan, I’ve downloaded the app for Trainline, this now looks straightforward, I would prefer a ticket from the machine but as you done print them off seems ok. Hopefully no rail strike.

Thanks Bob

[Martin ConnellyParticipant @martinconnelly55370]

On the subject of relying on mobile phones versus paper. I went on holiday a short while after the covid lockdown ended and proof of vaccination was required on entry to many countries. I, being a dinosaur, printed off mine and my wife’s as well as having them on the phones. As we got off the bus that took us from the aircraft to the terminal there were people checking the forms of people before they could enter the terminal building. There was a huge queue of people switching on their phones or switching off airplane mode. Those of us with paper certificates just breezed past all those trying to find theirs on their phones.

Martin C

[V8EngParticipant @v8eng]

Whichever way you get a ticket make sure you do it before getting on the train you have to have a ticket first somebody got fined for booking whilst on the train!
Also phones can and do go flat at the wrong moments and station ticket machines seem not guaranteed to be operational.

 

[Anthony KendallParticipant @anthonykendall53479]

Good advice above.
I usually use the phone-waving. Like many here who are suspicious that one day it will let me down, I often have a printout also – but I’ve never needed it! Perhaps I do not travel often enough by train to get into the real swing of it.

Suppose you could say why not just use the printout, but I don’t want to get like my dad was with the video recorder, and it is a gentle slope.

One point, Trainline often charge a fee and that can be avoided by using other sites. That said, Trainline does seem to have cracked it in the ease-of-use stakes – and that is often worth it.

Have a nice trip.

[BOB BLACKSHAW 1Participant @bobblackshaw1]

Thanks for the replies all. A print out ticket is the way I’m going. A trip to Chatham Dock yards by train will be a first long trip, the day’s of driving are getting a bit stressful nowadays.

Bob

[duncan webster 1Participant @duncanwebster1]

With the madness of our railway system I find that Northern Trains, who don’t go anywhere near Bedford or Chatham, will sell the same tickets on the same trains without a booking fee. You can also get cheaper fares by using split tickets where you split the journey into shorter sections. You don’t necessarily have to change trains, as long as the train actually stops at the break points. Utter madness. I normally use Trainline, the booking fee is small, and it’s what I’m used to.

Don’t forget to take your railcards (one each) with you or you’ll be hit by having to buy new tickets ar full price.

[Martin Connelly]

On Martin Connelly Said:

…

There was a huge queue of people switching on their phones or switching off airplane mode. Those of us with paper certificates just breezed past all those trying to find theirs on their phones.

Martin C

The opposite case is more common:  phone-waving and contactless gets one through turnstiles or on to buses much faster than messing with cash or paper.   Even though I am one, getting stuck in a queue of old-fashioned customers is very frustrating.  They’re so slow!

My pet-gripe with the railways is the overwhelming complexity of the ticket system.   When I first travelled by train, tickets were bought at the station, and pretty much cost what they cost.  All rather simple and predictable.   Unfortunately buying a straightforward ticket at the station is now the second most expensive way of buying a ticket, the worst being buying one on the train itself.   On the train, tickets are absolute top-price.   Now there are many alternatives.

So the customer has to play shops, looking for cheaper opportunities, of which there are many, many fly-by-night possibilities. Off-peak is fair enough,  but also necessary to search for offers made by the various different operators who may or may not be after your money, in advance, or on the day, depending on how the wind blows.

Considerable research is necessary: for example, travelling from Bristol to London, rather than buying a through ticket, it may be markedly cheaper to buy a ticket from Bristol to Reading, and another from Reading to Paddington.  Stay on the train. None of this is intuitive, and could be the other way round.   Recently, the cheapest way to travel first-class from Bristol to Paddington was to buy a through ticket from Bristol to Brussels, and not catch the Eurostar train.   Some people enjoy the challenge: personally, I like to keep it simple, and would much prefer a ticket system that didn’t waste my time.

These complicated opportunities have spawned a number of services whereby a website gets a cut for doing a basic automated search on behalf of baffled customers.  Their profits must add to travel costs.

Root cause I suggest was a botched privatisation.  In theory, competition forces providers to deliver cheaper services by finding efficiencies, and it can work.  In this case the way competition was created by putting boundaries between railway services fostered complexity, train travel hasn’t improved, and failed commercial providers still have to be rescued by the taxpayer.

Nationalisation isn’t a simple answer because that introduces a bunch of other problems.   Either way, the secret of success is getting the details right.  Political and economic ideas have to be backed up by competent delivery, which is hard.  In short, political ideas imposed on complex systems are doomed to fail unless some form of practical delivery can be engineered.  That requires continuity and expertise that politicians rarely have, though they often talk a good show.

Sooner or later the government will have to have another go at the railways; fingers crossed, results will be better next time.

Dave

[John HaineParticipant @johnhaine32865]

I frequently travel Bristol / home (Cambridgeshire) using a senior railcard.  Slightly bizarrely the best way to buy tickets is through the Greater Anglia site – they always seem to offer the cheapest ticket combination, an off-peak single each way.  By contrast the GWR site makes it hard to book a direct London – Temple Meads journey and doesn’t seem to offer the 2 singles option.  Always trying to make me change at Bristol Parkway.

[peak4Participant @peak4]

A few links for you.
Rather than Ticketline, I tend to use ;

National Rail https://www.nationalrail.co.uk/

For those trips in Northern Rail; if travelling as a pair, Duo tickets offer a discount, but I think only for off peak.
Other companies may do as well, I don’t know.
Northern Rail Duo https://www.northernrailway.co.uk/tickets/duo

There’s at least one website devoted to looking for split ticket discounts
Split Ticketing https://splitticketing.com/

Bill

[Chris CrewParticipant @chriscrew66644]

Although both my wife and I are fortunate enough to each have a car (although it falls to me to tax, test and insure both, Doh!) we only use them to travel to the nearest stations which are 7 miles (free parking) on one route and 15 miles on the other. I should say in this case we park in the nearest village that has a bus service, 7 miles again, and use our bus passes to get to the station.

I can’t even remember when I last bought a train ticket at a booking office, having used the excellent online service provided by Trainline and Split-ticketing since their inception, so may I respectfully disagree with ‘Dave’ when he says “Considerable research is necessary: for example, travelling from Bristol to London, rather than buying a through ticket”. It really isn’t, the websites do it all for you. You can do an ‘advanced’ search using ‘avoid’ or ‘travel via’ options to compare prices on the various routes, if alternatives are available. It is all very easy and convenient.

I use Trainline for all our continental rail journeys too and have never had a problem, it’s all very simple and straightforward. You search the journey you wish to make, pick the fare you are prepared to pay and the time you want to travel and hit ‘buy it now’, or equivalent button. A UK train ticket is emailed almost instantaneously to you which you can either print at home or download to your phone but you can elect to print it at the station for small additional fee. Personally, I wouldn’t want a paper ticket for anything these days (theatre, concerts etc.) but I understand if someone doesn’t feel confident using their smartphone. Go on, someone tell me they are still using a Nokia 3210, but not for much longer as 3G disappears this year.

(FYI, for some reason SNCF/SNCB will not issue your ticket until 5 days, or thereabouts, before your journey so if you happen to be on the continent before then you have no alternative but to download an electronic ticket so make sure you have post-Brexit data roaming enabled by your provider unless you can get online, e.g. via a hotel router. I don’t think many providers have roaming charges in the EU but my data was disabled outside the UK until I specifically requested it to be enabled).

Please permit me a small ‘gripe’. We are both in our seventies and neither of us has ever had a problem using ‘new technology’ as it has advanced and intruded into every aspect of life, so it really bugs me when I hear some younger person, usually from a charity or some such organisation, saying that older people don’t know how to use online purchasing or banking etc. That generation, if it was so confused by the new ways of working, must have almost disappeared by now. I have been online since 1996 (56k dial-up back then) and had an online bank account since 1997 and never once had a problem. That’s approaching thirty years now and I have never ceased to be amazed at what the new technology can do for me.

[duncan webster 1Participant @duncanwebster1]

I just tried 3 sites for bristol/London. All gave the same price. Train line will charge a booking fee, but it is possibly the easiest site, and it’s not a lot

[BOB BLACKSHAW 1Participant @bobblackshaw1]

Hello all, my journey to Chatham from Bedford went well  my return was Chatham, St Pancras.  Euston, Bletchley,  Kempston Hardwick.  The reason why was rail closure on the line to Bedford from St Pancras, I quite enjoyed the experience and will buy a railcard for more rail journeys.  Reading the small print can someone explain in simple language what this means.

Discount is not valid when traveling between two stations inside the London and the South East Network Railcard area.

Thanks Bob

[Michael GilliganParticipant @michaelgilligan61133]

Bob

Putting your queried text [without quote marks] into a Google search returns a good set of ‘hits’

I don’t have time to look through them all, but I think the answer is that to get the discount you would need your journey to cross the border of that combined zone … NOT to only travel within it.

MichaelG.

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