rebus
On my final warning
Beat the system: cheap rail tickets
http://www.guardian.co.uk/travel/2007/jan/04/railtravel.cheaptickets?page=all
Six journeys, six tricks
NB This is a guide to saving on completely unrestricted, walk-on single fares on direct trains at any time of day or night. More substantial savings can be made if you can travel off peak for all or part of your journey or book well in advance.
1 Penzance to Birmingham
Walk-on standard open single fare £85.50
Same direct train, but with two tickets, splitting the journey at Cheltenham (you don't have to get off) £72.60
How you do it Buy a saver single from Penzance to Cheltenham at £58 (which can be used at any time on this direct journey), and one from Cheltenham to Birmingham at £14.60. All direct trains stop at Cheltenham.
2 London to Newcastle
Walk-on standard open single fare £112
Same direct train, splitting the journey at Peterborough £97
How you do it Buy a standard open single from London to Peterborough at £21, and one from Peterborough to Newcastle at £76. All direct trains call at Peterborough.
3 Swindon to Swansea
Walk-on standard open single fare £53
Same direct train, splitting the journey at Bristol Parkway £32
How you do it Buy a standard open single from Swindon to Bristol Parkway at £15.10, and one from Bristol Parkway to Swansea at £16.90. Almost all direct trains call at Bristol Parkway.
4 London to Manchester
Walk-on standard open single fare £109.50
Same direct train, splitting the journey at Milton Keynes £93.30
How you do it Buy a standard open single from London to Milton Keynes at £20.30, and one from Milton Keynes to Manchester at £73. Some but not all trains call at Milton Keynes.
5 York to Edinburgh
Walk-on standard open single fare £66.50
Same direct train, splitting the journey at Berwick-upon-Tweed £54
How you do it Buy a standard open single from York to Berwick at £37 and a standard open single from Berwick to Edinburgh at £17. Around half of all direct trains call at Berwick.
6 Crewe to Glasgow
Walk-on standard open single fare £60.50
Same direct train, splitting the journey at Carlisle £51.20
How you do it Buy a standard open single from Crewe to Carlisle at £37.50, and a standard open day single from Carlisle to Glasgow at £13.70. All trains call at Carlisle.
Tactics
1 Decide which train you want to take, using www.nationalrail.co.uk
2 Find out which company operates the route. Go to their website and find a timetable to see where the train stops.
3 Using www.thetrainline.com, see if it's cheaper to buy two singles, splitting the journey en route (but staying on the train).
****
You feel bitter and twisted as you squeeze into your train seat and swing down the stained beige table. That woman in the next row: she looks suspiciously smug. You've just forked out £219 to travel from Manchester to London, an 8.4% rise on last week's price. Has she? Or did she forage on a secret website when the moon was full and, with Venus in the ascendant, dig out a spectacularly cheap fare?
Everyone has been hit by the latest increases in already high ticket prices. "We have the most expensive railway in Europe, and unless ministers act to enforce affordable fares, we will have a system that will soon be the preserve of the middle classes," says Gerry Doherty, general secretary of TSSA, the transport union. The union has found that passengers pay 55p for each of the 199 miles on the train between Manchester and London, but just 17p a mile between Paris and Calais. This year UK fares have risen by an average of 4.3% - 1% above inflation - but many popular routes, long and short, have been hit by far higher rises. A standard open return from London to Plymouth went up 12.6% to £214.
These increases come in a labyrinthine fare structure that is a legacy of the privatisation of British Rail. Franz Kafka could not conjure up a more complex tale than the way we have come to pay for our seat on a train. There are, however, some smart routes through this maze of fares and price increases - routes that can save you money every time you take the train, and that horrible sensation: cheap seat envy.
One tip is to start your journey on the internet. There are bargain tickets if you book in advance. Martin Lewis's www.moneysavingexpert.com website has some good suggestions, including checking National Rail's online promotions index and, if you're taking certain Virgin and South West Train routes, looking at megatrain.com to see if you can pick up a £1 ticket.
Of course, there's nothing more frustrating than failing to get cheap offers if you have had the forethought to book in advance. According to public transport consultant Barry Doe, train companies are better than airlines in terms of the number of bargain seats. But, crucially, they are not obliged to provide cheap seats on every train. Look for a £10 single from Birmingham to London on a busy Friday train and you probably won't find one, even weeks in advance.
It is difficult to know the best time to grab a cheap advance ticket, but train companies must set their timetables 12 weeks in advance and that is when cheap tickets are usually released, so searching exactly 12 weeks before your journey is one good tactic. But engineering works often delays timetables and can mean that cheap tickets are not made available until four or five weeks ahead. The only solution is to keep checking prices online.
Most of us, however, can't or don't want to plan our trips 12 weeks ahead. Just 17% of journeys made are with advance purchase tickets, according to Doe; the other 83% are pricey walk-on fares. And cheap advance tickets are not always best. You can easily pick up a bargain single fare one way and then get stuck with a standard single fare the other and end up paying the same as you would for a walk-on return. And you won't get a refund on a cheap advance ticket if circumstances force you to change your journey.
You can still make massive savings as a walk-on passenger, though. Don't go to a ticket machine: they won't be able to sell you the cheapest way to take your journey. Queue at the ticket office. While vendors work for a particular company, they are legally obliged to sell you the cheapest ticket between the start and end station you desire. But here is the bonkers bit: they are not obliged to tell you how to make your journey in the cheapest possible way - and their computers can't search for it for you. So you have to tell them.
The best trick is to split your tickets. Take Penzance to Birmingham: it is cheaper to buy a ticket to Cheltenham and then a ticket from Cheltenham to Birmingham. This works for single or return journeys. If you are travelling at peak time, it can help you save, because only half your journey (the first half) is a peak fare. This tactic gives you cheaper tickets on many popular routes and you can stay on the same train.
It also works out cheaper at any time you travel because of the ludicrous anomalies in our franchised system, according to Doe. Virgin sets the fare (and runs the service) from Penzance to Birmingham. Historically, they have increased fares more than other train companies. First Great Western decides the price from Penzance to Cheltenham, and Central Trains calculates the fare from Cheltenham to Birmingham. Both these companies are cheaper than Virgin. Even though you have bought two tickets, you can board exactly the same (Virgin) train and legally travel the whole way through to Birmingham as normal.
Every Penzance train stops at Cheltenham, but on other routes you need to check that your train of choice stops at the station you are splitting your ticket at. Otherwise, your tickets will be invalid. The easiest way to do this is check via National Rail Enquiries where your train stops. Then research prices on www.thetrainline.com to find exactly which station stop saves you the most money.
(One anomaly is harder to beat, by the way. You can travel between London and Glasgow for less than you can between London and Carlisle, despite the former being much further away. Similarly, you can get a cheaper fare from London to Edinburgh than you can to Newcastle. So if you buy a ticket from the capital to Edinburgh and travel only to Newcastle, you are fine as long as you are on the train. But once your journey is over, you could be stopped by an inspector at Newcastle and forced to pay the difference.)
Less obvious are the regional discount cards. A Network Railcard costs £20 and gives 34% off journeys across a huge swath of south-eastern England, from London outwards to Hastings in the south, Exeter (via Waterloo only) in the south-west, Worcester in the west, Northampton in the north and King's Lynn and Harwich in the east. Anyone can buy the card, although on Mondays to Fridays you can only use it after 10am at most stations (earlier on some routes). There are similar, less extensive discount cards for parts of Scotland, the north-east and Cornwall and Devon (where a card costs £10), although with these you will have to prove that you live in the area.
The most stylish and ridiculously brilliant fare-saving tactic, however, is this: do you travel around the country reasonably regularly after 10am but don't qualify for any discount cards? Wherever you live, march into your nearest station and demand a season ticket for the three-minute journey from Ryde St Johns Road to Ryde Esplanade on the Isle of Wight.
This, the cheapest season ticket in the UK, will set you back £116. Buying a season ticket automatically gives you a "Gold Card" - which entitles you to a third off almost all off-peak UK fares. You can also upgrade to first class for £5 return on most of your journeys if you want to give yourself a treat.
Even if you are travelling in the south-east, where you could get a third off with a £20 Network Railcard, this trick is better if you make lots of journeys that cost less than £10. The Network Railcard only gives you a discount down to £10, but as a gold card user you can get 34% off any ticket, at any price. So if you travel from Kingston-upon-Thames to London Waterloo on a cheap day return at £5.70, you will pay £3.76 thanks to your Isle of Wight season ticket. Even if you only make that trip three days a week, you will save more than £300 in a year.
Angry of Kingston writes ...
How one passenger beat the system
I am a reasonable person. I pay our ridiculous taxes. I try not to mock when the government says inflation is 3% and we get gas and electricity rises of 15%. I attempt to keep my blood pressure under control when our prime minister is sunning himself in Florida as the Iraq he helped to create spirals out of control. But on Tuesday, faced with a 35% rise in the rail fare from Kingston (in south-west London) to central London, I'm afraid my customary sang-froid snapped. I was furious.
I would have shouted at the poor clerk at Kingston station who had to pass on the absurd news - that a peak-time fare that used to be £6.80 was now going to cost me £9.20 - but he looked so sheepish and embarrassed by the rise that I couldn't bring myself to do it. I took a complaint form from him, intending to scrawl some abusive message, but in the end decided that would be childish and pointless.
I rang the rail regulator instead. The temp in reception took an age to find anyone he thought might be able to help, and when I did get through to the assistant of the Man Who Fields Complaints, she said the rail regulator didn't regulate fares, it dealt with safety issues. Try the Department of Transport, she suggested.
So I did. Amazingly, I got through straight away to a man called Mark Smith, a senior member of the fares and ticketing team. It was all his fault he admitted. Or rather, the Department of Transport's. For reasons of good house keeping, the DoT had asked the rail companies that serve London to equalise all fares from zone six (in which Kingston has the misfortune to fall) to central London. Kingston, he said, had had historically low fares - hence the correction.
"There will be winners and losers," he explained "and I'm afraid you're one of the losers." It has to be said that, so far, none of the alleged winners has come to light.
Oddly, I did feel better for my chat with Mr Smith. There was some logic to the outrage. But it is still deeply unfair. Why should the DoT assume that the average Kingstonian can afford an extra £2.40 a day? The rise is an absurdity - but, happily, there is a suitably absurd solution.
A mile up the road from Kingston, two minutes by train, is Norbiton: a smaller station staffed by a friendly, grey-haired ticket clerk. Magically - not a word often applied to Norbiton - it is in zone five. From here, a ticket to central London will cost you £7.20. Walking to and from Norbiton station will take me an extra 20 minutes a day, but, hey, I need the exercise, and I certainly need the money. I have, at a stroke, reduced my fare increase to a more manageable 6%.
Prediction: Kingston will become a ghost station, and the elderly clerk at Norbiton is about to get a whole lot busier.
Check train times: nationalrail.co.uk/index.html
Buy tickets online: www.thetrainline.com
Cheap travel hints: http://www.moneysavingexpert.com/travel/cheap-train-tickets
Megatrain: www.megatrain.com
Barry Doe: www.barrydoe.plus.com
