Beginner's guide to UK passenger rail
/[Note to the reader: in this post I’m using specific examples of specific cities in the UK, but I am not bothering to give any information about them because it’s irrelevant to the post. If you want to know where Saxmundham is, Google is just a keystroke away.]
For the last 3 weeks I’ve been on vacation in the UK, and will be sharing some interesting, valuable, and/or fun lessons I learned along the way. In today’s edition, I want to dump everything I learned about booking and saving money on passenger rail in England and Scotland.
What is Network Rail?
To give a mostly-accurate potted history, the UK nationalized their rail industry after World War II. In the 90’s under New Labour, they privatized the operation of freight and passenger rail, but kept ownership and management of the tracks and stations in a public entity. That public entity is now called Network Rail (it had some other names in the past).
What is National Rail?
National Rail is the public-facing brand of the privatized passenger rail companies. Why National Rail matters is that it operates “underneath” the private operating companies and creates a kind of interoperability between them. This has the potential to be convenient, a bit like the baggage interline agreements that allow airlines to check bags through on connections operated by other carriers, although there are some important pitfalls to watch out for, which I cover below.
What are Railcards?
The second, much more important reason that National Rail matters is that they sell Railcards. There are several different Railcards, but they all operate roughly the same: when you purchase a National Rail ticket, select which Railcard you have, and you’ll receive a discount, usually 1/3 of the price, if the fare is eligible. Virtually all trips after 10 am and on weekends and public holidays are eligible for the discount, as are some trips beginning before 10 am. There are basically 3 buckets Railcards fall into:
Group-based. “Family & Friends” and “Two Together” Railcards provide discounts when traveling in specific group formations.
Age-based. There are Railcards for 16-17 year olds, 16-25 year olds, 26-30 year olds, and seniors.
Status-based. People with certain verified disabilities and veterans of the UK Armed Forces are eligible for status-based Railcards.
These are listed very roughly in order of money-saving potential, and as you can see, most people are eligible for one of these “good” Railcards, with the exception of adults between the ages of 31 and 59 who always travel alone. They are still eligible for the generic Network Railcard, which offers discounts only in “London and the South East.”
Finally, it’s essential to note that you can have more than one Railcard, and use a different Railcard for different trips depending on what generates the most savings.
How do Railcards work?
This is the easy part. Whenever you’re booking a train in England, Scotland, and Wales, you’ll see a dropdown box allowing you to select your Railcard. Here’s an example from Greater Anglia:
The price shown on the booking page will then reflect your Railcard discount. Here’s the exact same trip for 2 adults between London Liverpool Street and Saxmundham before and after applying a “Two Together” Railcard:
As you can see, the Two Together Railcard saves £7.50 on a single short trip. For longer trips, Railcards can pay for themselves in a single reservation. Advance tickets for two adults from London to Glasgow on an Avanti West Coast service, for example, cost £65.60 without a Railcard, and just £43.20 with one. On close-in reservations the savings can be much higher: the same two tickets booked for tomorrow cost £285.20 without a railcard and £188.20 with one!
Most Railcards are good for an entire year, but my Two Together Railcard paid for itself several times over in less than 3 weeks.
The Family & Friends Railcard is the most gimmicky of the Railcards, but offers the most potential savings. Each £30 Railcard can have two named adults; one of those adults must be traveling on any ticket purchased with the Railcard (the Two Together Railcard requires both named people to be traveling on the ticket). Up to 3 additional adults can travel on the ticket. In addition, at least one child aged 15 or younger must be traveling on the ticket. The adults receive the standard 1/3 discount, and the children a 60% discount. A roundtrip ticket on the same Avanti West Coast service as above for 4 adults and 4 children ages 5-15 would cost £314.40 without a Railcard and just £222.40 with one.
Note that children’s tickets in general are pretty cheap; most of the savings being realized here are on the more expensive adult tickets. However, you do need one ticketed child in order to unlock those larger savings on the adult tickets.
Do you really need a Railcard?
Everything I said above is based on the rules laid out in black and white on the Railcard website. In fact, it is not clear to me that you need a Railcard at all in order to realize these discounts. That’s because ticketing is available online, tickets can be picked up at unattended kiosks, and most importantly, British ticket inspectors do not appear to me to care at all about the rules.
Of the 8 trains we took in the UK, our tickets were only inspected 3 times, and not one conductor asked to see my digital Railcard. Like a dumb American I volunteered to show my Two Together Railcard on the first train, but didn’t even bother doing that on the rest. If you lived in the UK and traveled frequently with adult friends and minor children, or with your adult partner, then you may as well buy a Family & Friends or Two Together Railcard since they’re so cheap and the savings are so significant, but if you’re just visiting and taking a train or two, you’re probably safe bluffing it.
Should you book “direct?”
Remember up top when I mentioned that train operators are private companies in the UK? Thanks to National Rail, all or most of the passenger rail companies in Great Britain can sell tickets on each other’s services, and there are no price differences on any of the routes I checked. This is roughly the equivalent of United allowing Delta to sell tickets on United for the same price as United charges when booking directly.
But this does not make the booking channels interchangeable. There are three big differences between the various booking channels.
First, seat reservations. The only trains we took with reserved seats were on the Avanti West Coast line between London and Glasgow, and because I booked our tickets through Greater Anglia (because they operated the first leg of our trip), I was not able to select our seats. If I had booked the ticket directly through Avanti West coast, I would have been able to pick them before even booking the ticket to make sure our seats were together, facing the right direction, etc.
Second, routing. While pricing is uniform across booking channels, unsurprisingly each operator’s routing algorithm works better on routes it actually serves. This came up on our trip when Greater Anglia booked us on an Avanti West Coast train from London to Preston in order to change to a Northern Railway train to Windermere. Plugging the origin and destination into Avanti West Coast directly gives the much preferable change at Oxenholme Lake District. Fortunately, the conductor on our Avanti train told us to just wait until Oxenholme to change, but if the conductor hadn’t asked what our final destination was and taken the trouble to sort us out, we would have tried to change to the slower Northern Railway train earlier than we needed to and risked our connection.
Finally, to circle back to Railcards, while pricing and discounts are uniform, the validation algorithm varies widely in quality, which may work to your benefit. For example, Avanti will (incorrectly) price out a Friends & Family Railcard discount for a reservation with 4 adults and no children, while Greater Anglia’s otherwise much less glossy booking engine will not, instead (correctly) returning pricing for four full-fare adult tickets.
Ground transit add-ons
Depending on your origin and destination, you may be offered the option to prepay for a bus or subway connection at the beginning or end of your trip.
For example, if your train originates in London, you’ll be offered the chance to buy a Travelcard that works on the London Underground and buses on the day of your departure. Unfortunately, the Travelcard costs £14.40 or £20.30, the maximum that can be charged for Zones 1-4 and 1-6, respectively, when using London’s Oyster payment cards. If you travel any amount less than the maximum, you’re overpaying.
On the flip side, arriving in Glasgow on a Railcard ticket lets you pay £2.70 for a PlusBus card that lets you take buses all around Great Glasgow on the day of your arrival, which offers at least a modest discount over an all-day bus pass.
In other words, savings are possible at specific destinations, when you’re purchasing tickets using a Railcard, but don’t assume booking your rail and transit tickets together will automatically save you money.
A final note on routing
I mentioned routing above in the context of the different passenger rail companies’ ticketing engines, but there’s a slightly separate issue that’s worth mentioning: it can be hard to figure out what your origin and destination are even supposed to be, especially when you plan to make connections by bus or taxi instead of rail.
I don’t have an easy solution except brute force: use Google or Apple Maps to search your origin and destination, then narrow in on the pieces operated by National Rail, then plug those routes into a few different operators’ websites, keeping in mind you might need to book legs separately or through different operators in order to get the best available routing and discounts.
