Buying a Train Ticket

I spent way too much time today learning how to purchase a British train ticket online and thought I would pass along what I learned. Perhaps this will save someone else some time and frustration. If you order train tickets ahead of time, they are much cheaper.

Initially I'd wanted to make a roundtrip reservation from Alnwick to Edinburgh for the second weekend we are in England (July 26 and 27). I went through the website above and discovered that, according to the website, Alnmouth is the closest train station to Alnwick. (Mert and Marcia, does that correspond with your experience?)

You can type in: Alnmouth or the three letter code -- ALM.

However, I ran into a couple of glitches and thought I'd pass them along. First of all, even though I typed in the date and day of departure and clicked on their option for that date, by the time I got to the final page and was ready to purchase, the dates had changed. Be careful. I still don't know what happened, but I'd suggest triple-checking everything. I checked it each step of the process, yet somehow the information had changed by the last screen.

Also, when I clicked to purchase, a screen came up that I hadn't seen before. Advance tickets (with very reasonable prices) can only be purchased if you are living in the UK or if you can pick up your ticket from the local ticket kiosk at certain stations in person on the day you expect to travel. It appears that Alnmouth does not have one of these ticket kiosks, so I could not purchase that portion of my ticket ahead of time. However, I was able to purchase the portion from Edinburgh to Alnmouth because they have one of the ticket centers at the Edinburgh (Waverley) station. Once purchased, all you need to claim your ticket is the confirmation number they give you on-line and the credit card you used to make your reservation.

My one-way advanced fare was about 9 pounds. I'm sure the other portion of the ticket -- one-way from Alnmouth to Edinburgh will be quite a bit more! I couldn't find any way to order that at the advanced fare special rate, however. The estimated traveling time on the train between Alnmouth and Edinburgh is an hour.

If anyone else is planning to travel from Alnwick, I hope this information is helpful.

The link to plan and purchase a train ticket is http://www.nationalrail.co.uk/