We are travelling to UK in March. When I was last there (in 2002), the trains were fine. Oh, I heard plenty of bitching about them, but seriously, they were on time (a minute or two late or early–but that’s it), the people who work on them were courteous and helpful, the cars were clean (except the nastiest smoking car up north. I flat out refused to stay in it–and neither did the Aussie woman and her family-faced with mass insurrection, the conductor allowed us to stay in the next car). I rate rail travel in UK a solid A; compared to USA: a weak C.
OK-I have been there and done that. Had a Britrail pass–a wonderful thing. Now we are all going,and need to make decisions about how to travel about etc.
I am hearing stories from a British pen pal (internet friend) that tickets from London to Manchester cost 202 pounds with no seat guarantee and often standing room only! :eek:
Huh?
We are flying into Heathrow, want to do London-y things (Tower etc) and then go to Bath and Dover and perhaps York. I thought the train would be perfect-no?
God knows I do not want to rent a car in London…
So, could UK Dopers help me out here with some straight dope, please?
Its all about preparation, if you book and pay for your ticket at least 2 weeks ahead, preferably one month, you will not pay the exhorbitant rates of the unrestricted return ticket prices.
Unrestricted return means you can choose any journey time both ways with up to one week between journeys - dependant upon the exact ticket and train company. This is a very expensive way to travel.
I have personally done Leeds-London return, with booked times out and back with 1 month notice and it cost £20, I can’t even drive there one way for that.
If you cannot book so far in adance, then coaches are the way to go, not marvellous but reliable and much much cheaper.
Given our prices here, you want to save as much as you can on travel and have more to spend on yourself, go for bed and breakfast accomodation, much more personal and cheaper, its a good way to meet the natives.
£202 is for a Standard Open Return peak time ticket i.e. the most expensive Standard Class ticket there is. Travel outside rush hour and an off-peak return ticket would be about £55. With a rail pass and/or advance purchase you might be able to get a better price than that.
What the others said. British railway ticketing has modelled itself on the inpenetrable fare systems used by airlines, the presence of Virgin being a leading factor in this. The £200 fare is the equivalent of walking up to a desk at Heathrow and asking for a ticket on the next flight to New York.
A quick check on www.thetrainline.com showed plenty of £25-return tickets London-Manchester for late January. I’ve no idea about how easy it is to book tickets from outside the UK, to be able to get these fares before you arrive. If you can, then play around with various dates & routes, and you should be able to come up with something very reasonable.
Coaches - some people swear by them. I swear at them. I’d rather crawl up the motorway naked. They can also take a lot longer than the train - in the case of London-York, around 5 hours instead of two. One takes up half the day, the other can get you there for a late breakfast.
Don’t rule out domestic flights - there’s a fairly comprehensive list of low-cost airlines here. Although they’re probably not going to be particuarly useful for the itenerary you’ve suggested so far.
For these kinds of questions, the Lonely Planet forums are a goldmine of information.
http://www.megabus.com/ - from london you can pretty much get anywhere for about a £5 as long as you are willing to put up with sitting on a rather slow coach.
http://www.nationalrail.co.uk - very useful fo checking out maintenance schedules etc fo the trains. at any one time an awful lot of routes seem to be affected these days. it also has the same routfinding functions as thetrainline plus for much nearer the time live departure boards… if thats yer thing
I know this thread seems to have come to an end but I’d just like to add another “don’t panic” vote. I managed to get Ponster and myself from London to Nottingham and back again for a grand total of just over thrity pounds. Yes, you read aright, that’s just over thirty, three zero, of your British pounds !Travelling just before and just after Christmas to boot. Anyway we had booked seats and I’d allowed for potential late-ness so we didn’t have any problems.
After failing to register with the Midland Mainline website to book online I ended up calling them (from France) and the woman was actually really helpful and she managed to wangle some deal where in fact we were buying two sets of return tickets but only using one part of each ???
Moral if possible speak to someone not just online. Oh and also travelling to and from London avoid the ‘rush hour’ peak periods as tickets prices change.
PS You get to see much nicer views from trains than buses, and (puts on snob voice) coaches generally attract a different class of passenger.
In October, I took trains from London to Portsmouth and Leeds and paid something like $20 and $35 repsectively for round trip. So Don’t despair. I was able to pick up all my tickets at once from a machine at Kings Cross station so I didn’t even have to worry about waiting in line on the days of travel. The sites already recommended are the ones I used to peruse my trip selection.
Have fun. And definately visit the Tower of London.
I regularly travel between Birmingham and London, and turn up at the station, get ticket, and go fares (saver returns), which so long as you don’t want to travel during rush hour, allow you travel on any train, with a maximum of 1 month between outward and return journeys, cost in the region of £30. So, its not as bad as its made out to be. If, however, you were to get on the train, with no ticket, and ask the ‘train manager’ as they call them now, for a return ticket, you’d be looking at about £100.
unfortunately the birmingham to london trip isn’t reflective of any other trips out of london (except maybe manchester, leeds and edingburgh, the big 3) because its so regular and cheap (Chiltern railways regular service has proven a godsend!). Having done the journey to and from london once a month for a couple of years I was horrified when I tried to go anywhere else from london, to get to ipswich it was cheaper to go via peterborough than london simply due to the London to ipswich leg.
Midlands mainline is a killer pricewise too. London to leicester cost over double of birmingham to london ye they are about the same distance in travel time.
of course all that means nothing unles you live in birmingham or london… apart from making the point that Birmingham is really easy and cheap to get to from london
Interesting. I’ve always found that once I’m in London, getting to other places in the south isn’t really all that expensive. Maybe its just the places I visit once I’m in London though.
i guess it must be down to the individual train companies then, whoever run the southern lines must be comparitively cheap in the same way chiltern railways are. Virgin are very sporadic pricewise, and central trains have apparently just raised ther prices by just over 6% though i haven’t actually noticed any yet…
I suppose this might’ve (and might be) the case if you do it at peak early-evening times when routes out of Liverpool Street are at there most expensive. But I do also recall a couple of strange cheap routings to East Anglia which resulted from misprints in the big-book-of-fares, which they honoured.
And in any case, wouldn’t going London-P’boro-Ipswich take about three hours? Hardly my choice of a way to save a tenner!
