I was behind someone in a ticket queue the other day, who said that he had tried to buy a ticket online and ended up going to the train station to buy it due to being frustrated by the whole experience of using thetrainline.com to buy his ticket. I have some sympathy for his plight.
With ticket prices soaring on our trains, the best value is to be found online - how easy, therefore, is it to book in advance on the web? The trainline is a website which should let you buy a train ticket from any train company in the country. However, in practice, whether due to the heavy volume of traffic, or lazy coding I don't know, it is slow and cumbersome to use and often freezes halfway through making a booking. It also frequently cannot find the times of trains. If any of these happens, you have to start all over again.
However, providing
you are in luck and manage to go through the process, it is actually quite useful. It gives you the option of the full range of fares to choose from, including booking two singles instead of a return, which you probably wouldn't get from a human being at a train station, unless you knew exactly what you were asking for.
I think it is wrong that there is so much discrepancy in prices of train tickets. Why should a peak ticket cost twice as much as a non-peak ticket? Obviously the train companies are ripping people off who have to travel to work. Equally, why should you be able to get ridiculously cheap fares if you book early enough, but have to pay through the nose if something urgent crops up? Why can't there just be one fare per journey, the same as on a bus? I suppose the very confusing fare system could only be rationalised if the train service is brought back into public ownership.
Anyway, one of the best ways to make sense of this horrendously bad system is to book online and as far in advance as you possibly can. Make sure you don't have to travel before 9.30 in the morning or between 5 and 6 in the evening.
thetrainline should help customers be able to do this. it is well set up and easy to follow, with a simple flowchart to aid you in the steps to buying a ticket. You have to log in, select the stations you want to travel from and the times of the train, then you are given a menu with buttons to click on, showing which train you would prefer. However, you must remember that tickets for individual trains are not transferable, so if you miss your train - hard luck - you may have to pay again. If you cannot guarantee to get on a particular train, you may have to shell out a bit more for a general ticket allowing you to travel on any off-peak service - the "Saver", or at peak times the horrendously pricey "Open" ticket.
Booking on-line also has the advantage of being able to pick up your ticket from a "Fastticket" machine at the station, or having it posted to your house if there is enough time. The Fastticket machine is easy to use - you just swipe the card you used to purchase the ticket as proof of ID and request your ticket.
Another word of warning is that the traveline webiste automatically adds travel insurance costing £2 to your fare and charges £2.50 credit card fee - so pay by debit card and remember to unclick boxes for anything you don't need. There are other websites belonging to individual train franchises, such as Midland Mainline or Virgin, which may not charge a credit card fee.
An alternative mode of cheap train travel - from £1 a seat - is megatrain.com - who piggyback their carraiges onto other services. However, this is only available from London to the South West and a few other parts of the country, so isn't much use for most people.
To sum up then - traveline is a useful website for helping you plan a journey and get reasonable deals on train tickets. However, it would be much better if there was a simpler system of ticketing in the first place, where you could get a single ticket from any station to any other and with sensibly priced tickets, all at the same rate no matter when you were travelling, or how much notice you gave. Tickets could be priced according to that novel idea of how far the journey is. I remember a comedian complaining about the railways, saying "through ticketing - we used to be able to manage it, have we lost the skills pay through the nose if something urgent crops up? Why can't there just be one fare per journey, the same as on a bus? I suppose the very confusing fare system could only be rationalised if the train service is brought back into public ownership.
Anyway, one of the best ways to make sense of this horrendously bad system is to book online and as far in advance as you possibly can. Make sure you don't have to travel before 9.30 in the morning or between 5 and 6 in the evening.
thetrainline should help customers be able to do this. it is well set up and easy to follow, with a simple flowchart to aid you in the steps to buying a ticket. You have to log in, select the stations you want to travel from and the times of the train, then you are given a menu with buttons to c
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