Advance booking
By booking an Advance ticket, you can secure an average saving of up to 61 per cent on a “walk-up fare”. Advance tickets are valid exclusively on the date and train specified but they can represent significant savings on long journeys. For instance, a London Euston-Liverpool Lime Street ticket for mid-March costs from £50 return (two advance singles). That’s, compared with £145.40 for two off-peak singles. And an anytime single is a whopping £171.30.
Advance tickets generally go on sale 12 weeks before your date of travel, though Grand Central Advance fares are available up to 26 weeks in advance between London and any of the company’s calling points in Yorkshire and the North East. National Rail hosts a Booking Horizons page, showing the furthest date in the future you can buy advance tickets for each train firm today.
All Advance tickets are singles, and are sold in limited numbers, subject to availability and on a first come, first served basis. The RDG says “up to half a million Advance tickets are released each week for less than £10”, but they get scooped up fast.
Get to know other ticket types
Off peak, Anytime, Season, Flexi, Rangers and Rovers, Oyster and Contactless: who knew there were so many? Have a browse here, but, basically, Anytime is for business travellers, while Off peak and Advance are for the rest of us.
Class is a slightly more nuanced affair, as first-class deals are often available for little or no extra on Advance tickets – and the website should pop this option up as you’re booking. In general, Off-Peak hours begin at 9.30am from Monday to Friday in cities and large towns, and at 9am everywhere else.
Where there is more than one Off-Peak fare for your journey, the cheaper fare – with more restrictions – is the Super Off-Peak. Off-Peak and Super Off-Peak Day tickets are only valid on the date shown on your ticket, and Off-Peak and Super Off-Peak Returns are valid for one month from the date shown on your ticket.
Whoever came up with the “Super” bit is probably the person who made some returns 10p more than singles; in February 2023, Transport Secretary Mark Harper said returns would be scrapped to simplify things. Watch this space.
Split tickets
About ten years ago, there was a lot of media commotion and a wee bit of excitement when companies like trainsplit.com – quickly joined by splitticketing.com, ticketysplit.com and others – started spreading what rail fans and official fare-manual nerds had known for years – that rail journeys in Great Britain are not always priced on mileage. A “split ticket” is simply an A to E ticket divided into, in this example, five sections, A-B, B-C, C-D, D-E.
You know who bought split tickets because they had a wad of orange tickets in their shirt pocket and can be seen changing seats at places like Cheltenham – because often the same train can be used even when the leg of the journey and ticket are “new”.
Sometimes – and this is insane, but true – it can be cheaper to buy a ticket for a longer distance that you mean to go. For example, some tickets for journeys through London have been found to be cheaper than those ending in London, to the delight of spotters.
A word of caution. When travelling using Advance tickets, the small print says: “You may not start, break and resume, or end your journey at any intermediate station except to change to/from connecting trains as shown on the ticket(s) or other valid travel itinerary.” The jargon is “stopping short” and doing it carries a potential fine, but you could only get caught alighting early if the guard jumped off too and dragged you back on.
Consider changing your route
It’s long been cheaper to hop on a stopper from Gatwick to London rather than riding in the Gatwick Express, aimed at jetlagged air travellers. It can sometimes be wise to check on alternative routes for longer trips. Clitheroe-London involves two changes and costs £77.70 one way.
But the bus fare to Preston is currently £4 thanks to the extension of the Government’s bus fare cap scheme and Preston-London return is £35 – simply because Advance tickets are still available. Plugging in routes and dates is tedious but it can be worth hundreds of pounds if you’re travelling as a family.