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Planning your trip in Rail travel in the United Kingdom
Planning your trip in Rail travel in the United Kingdom
The best source of information for all aspects of rail travel in the UK is National Rail . The site provides journey planning tools, live updates for all stations on the network, station information and ticket information, as well as a useful Cheapest Fare Finder tool for discovering the cheapest possible fare between two cities. They also operate the National Rail Enquiries phone service on +44 845 748 4950.
The National Rail website does not sell tickets (however it will send you to your choice of several websites, preloaded with your ticket request ready to order from the other website). You buy tickets at staffed ticket offices and ticket machines at railway stations, or from one of several websites. All staffed train station ticket offices and all train operators' websites sell tickets for all National Rail services. Among the train operators' websites recommending for planning travel and buying tickets is:
East Coast is a train operating company with one of the more attractive and easy-to-use ticketing systems. It is particularly useful because of the way in which it allows you to compare the cost of two one-way tickets versus a return ticket. A lowest fare finder also quickly shows you the cheapest combination of trains. 'It makes no extra charge for credit / debit card payments nor ticket collection / delivery and also offers approximately 10% discount on Advance fares for trains operated by East Coast.
Additionally a number of generic train booking websites exist, but these are not recommended because of their unavoidable additional fees (namely for booking, using a debit card, using a credit card, receiving tickets by post or collecting them at the station.
thetrainline.com is one of the largest train ticketing websites, but its interface is not as easy to use as others and it charges both additional credit / debit card handling fees and a fee to collect your tickets from a station or to have them posted to you. However its Ticket Alert can help you plan advance travel by emailing you when cheaper Advance tickets become available, route by route.
RailEasy is another independent train booking website, but it also charges unavoidable additional fees.
MyTrainTicket is also an independent train ticket booking website, which also charges a booking fee, though there is no additional charge for paying by debit card or for collection from Ticket on Departure machines.
Takethetrain.co.uk is a new independent train ticket booking website, they do not charge any fee for card payments or booking.
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Rail travel in the United Kingdom Travel Guide from Wikitravel. Many thanks to all Wikitravel contributors. Text is available under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0, images are available under various licenses, see each image for details.