What's the secret of cheap train travel?

[dudleybloke]

Couple of these.



Might need some goggles too.

[simoid]

The Moose said:

I'd like to go to Totnes from Slough for a long weekend in 4 - 5 months time.

£88 return per adult seems bloody expensive for 4 of us to go for a long weekend (Fri to Sun).

Surely that can't be the cheapest ticket?

Can you go by car? I generally find that £car = £train for 2 people if you can get a good deal, but you're going to struggle to beat car costs taking 4 peeps by train.

[droopsnoot]

I'd second going to the booking office and asking if there's anything special for groups. I did a work trip Crewe to Watford for three people some time ago, website wanted £80-odd each return but crashed when we tried to book it. Booking office person found a group booking for up to four people for £56 all in. If we'd not been charging it to work the first price would have just made us go by car. Obviously not always possible, but sometimes the web isn't the cheapest way.

[The Moose]

simoid said:

The Moose said:

I'd like to go to Totnes from Slough for a long weekend in 4 - 5 months time.

£88 return per adult seems bloody expensive for 4 of us to go for a long weekend (Fri to Sun).

Surely that can't be the cheapest ticket?

Can you go by car? I generally find that £car = £train for 2 people if you can get a good deal, but you're going to struggle to beat car costs taking 4 peeps by train.

Of course I could go by car. Just brings potential traffic in busy periods (Fri evening and Sun evening) hence why we were looking at the train.

It's hopefully I'm going to be going down more regularly so it'd be nice to have it sorted.

Motorbike may be the answer...

[wijit]

If you got 2x Two Together railcards and travelled on the 20:38 outbound the outbound fare will be £93.80, and return £54.20 on the 19:52. Booking on First Great Western, you should be able to use "PPFIRST" to get 10% off.

[simoid]

The Moose said:

Of course I could go by car. Just brings potential traffic in busy periods (Fri evening and Sun evening) hence why we were looking at the train.

It's hopefully I'm going to be going down more regularly so it'd be nice to have it sorted.

Motorbike may be the answer...

Cool cool

I don't often have to contend with traffic that would delay me noticeably so hadn't considered that.

[alangla]

You're booking too early - Advance Purchase tickets (i.e. the cheapest ones) only go on sale about 12 weeks in advance.
Keep an eye on this page - http://www.nationalrail.co.uk/times_fares/ticket_t... - when First Great Western's date passes beyond the date you want to go, try booking. FGW might offer you a text alert when the tickets you want go on sale - have a look at their website.

[rs1952]

The Moose said:

Thank you for that. MUch appreciated.

Out of interest, how can one find out the FGW zones?

Is this likely a pointless task as I'll end up on the bloody buses anyway?!

I don't think they advertise their zoning structure as such - its just something I found out by digging into their fare structure. From my home station, for example, a ticket to every station in the greater Bristol area costs exactly the same, despite that fact there are a good 10 miles between the easternmost (Keynsham - that's K-E-Y-N-S-H-A-M for our older brethren )and the westernmost, Parson Street, and the cost per mile for the overall trip varies quite a lot when you look at it in that way.

Regarding the Chippenham-Didcot-Henley example I gave earlier, this is selective pricing for you. Somebody at FGW has probably decided that nobody wants to go from Chippenham to Didcot, so they offer a lower price, and from Didcot to Henley there is bus competition so they have to make their price competitive with that.

Network Rail usually plan their weekend engineering work some time in advance, so it should be straightforward to look at their website to see what they're up to, and make sure that the weekend you are planning to travel doesn't have any engineering work on the line you will be using.

Finally, alangla picked up something I missed. Wot he said - you can only buy the cheapest advance fares up to 3 months in advance, so they are probably not advertising their best fares for your proposed journey beyond 29th April at the moment. Even though you might not be travelling then, to get a better comparison it would be best to enter dates into the search engine that are less than three months ahead. That way you will see what sort of prices you can get if you book closer to the date.