Finding cheap train tickets is hard work

It’s way past time that Which? lodged a super-complaint about train fares. What’s especially annoying is that National Rail have a tool called “Cheapest Fare Finder”, that doesn’t return the cheapest valid fares for the journey (split tickets). Surely this is violating some laws?

Some other caveats with split tickets to be aware of, apart from the frustration associated with booking them: it complicates Delay Repay and can make life harder during Engineering works.

A very helpful 4-page spread, but no mention of a campaign to eliminate this nonsense! Any government of whatever hue should be ashamed that this prevails on their watch.
WHICH should initiate action to lobby to resolve this. A good start would be to draw comparisons with the best foreign systems.
Do we want less car travel and more rail travel or not?

For those who live near London and have to commute there is can be worth looking at tickets further than you want to go. I sometimes travel from Essex to Zone 1 and found that I can save about 10% by getting a ticket to Clapham Junction, which effectively gives a ticket to Liverpool Street, tube journey to Waterloo and then mainline to Clapham Junction. I simply use the ticket to take me into Zone 1. There must be other examples of this as well.

It is also worth mentioning that you can massively cut the cost of rail travel by getting a Railcard, if you are eligible for one.

I have a hearing problem and this does entitle me to a Disabled persons railcard – which massively cuts the cost of rail travel. Your travelling companion also gets the same discount.

It is also not widely known that Virgin Trains (I believe it is only Virgin that does this) allows railcard holders – any railcard, not just a disabled persons card – to travel using off-peak tickets on peak services. From my local station in the midlands it is possible to get the weekday 07:15 Virgin service to Euston for £29.10 travelling on an off-peak ticket. Without the railcard any Anytime Return would cost an eye-watering £162.

http://www.railcard.co.uk/

I use Virgin regularly Birmingham-London and if you use right train and book ticket with Virgin and with a Senior railcard First single is £15.50 including all facities of First class.

There are so many anomalies with train fares. I have also found that it’s often cheaper to book a ticket for a destination further away than where you want to go, and then get off the train at the station you want.

For example travelling to Chester from Sheffield: if I book a ticket from Sheffield to Holyhead (getting off the train early at Chester which is just over half way to Holyhead) the cheapest ticket is £25. Whereas if I book the same train from Sheffield but choose Chester as the destination it costs £26.90! Not a huge saving you may think, but this is only one example – there are many many more.

How, in anyone’s mind, can that make sense?

So agree with all the above, especially Didier.

Here’s my tale: I regularly travel from Norwich to London and back again, booking my tickets from Greater Anglia’s website with my senior railcard and, being fortunate in being able to chose my times, nearly always get a good deal. So when a friend from France who’s coming to stay at the end of the month said he needed to travel to Telford on 29 January I said leave it to me, I’ll sort out the ticket.

I logged into my account with GA, decided the 10.57am from Norwich to Telford Central would be good and it came up with a ticket price of £84.80. That’s bit steep, I thought, so inspired by Which’s piece on splitting, I thought i’d give it a go. None of the websites cited in the piece were any use in suggesting alternatives so I thought I’d do it manually, as it were.

The journey from Norwich involved two changes – Norwich to Ely; Ely to Birmingham New Street; Birmingham New Street to Telford Central – with each leg run by a different operator, East Midland Trains, CrossCountry Trains and London Midland respectively. So I thought, what if I buy separate tickets for each leg?

Still using my GA account and using exactly the same trains and conditions as the £84.80 itinerary, I was offered Norwich to Ely for £5.00; Ely to Birmingham New Street for £21.30; Birmingham New Street to Telford for £9.80 – a total of £36.10. Incredulous, I decided to check it against another website, Trainline, and was offered exactly the same £84.80/£36.10 deals.

Eschewing Trainline’s £1.50 booking fee and 2% credit card fee, I bought my three sets of tickets from GA, happy with my 57% saving. But hang on a moment, this isn’t just bonkers, or even a touch of caveat emptor. This appears to be, either through c**k-up or conspiracy, a clear case of defrauding unwitting travellers.

There’s no doubt about the effectiveness of Which’s campaign on PPI; with that in the bag perhaps it is time to turn to the iniquities being practised on the increasingly hapless passengers on our hopelessly privatised railways

As the split-ticketing Guru in our family, I’m almost disappointed that you’ve given away this secret – because I am expecting the day when the train companies find a way to force you to get off the train at each destination you have a ticket for. In the case of my last such journey this would mean (starting from Norwich) at Ely, Peterborough, Manchester and Liverpool – where I had to change anyway to reach the Wirral.
Short journeys are often covered by cheap day tickets, and as you mentioned, some stretches are travelled at times where there is less congestion and where there are therefore cheaper tickets available. Sitting on the through train from Norwich to Liverpool Lime Street, the inconvenience of moving between seats reserved for each stretch of the journey and showing 4 tickets each way was more than outweighed by the saving of about £35 on the return journey (with Senior Railcard).
But shhh! don’t shout about it, because any changes to eliminate this “confusion” are sure to be to our disadvantage.