The Student Room Group

Same length train journey 3X as expensive

I'm going to uni in southampton soon and my girl friend lives in tunbridge wells so I've been looking up train fare for if i visit her. The train journey is a similar amount of time to what I've been doing from essex, about 2hrs 40 minutes, but whereas i have been paying about £20 off peak and getting there at 10 am, the website says now I'd have to pay £32 off peak to arrive at 12pm, and if i wanted to get there earlier it'd be £60 or so. As a student i cant afford that as a regular trip, there must be some cheaper way of doing it without wasting all day, i don't get how it's so much more expensive for a similar journey.
Reply 1
The money quoted is with a railcard
Original post by suiagg
I'm going to uni in southampton soon and my girl friend lives in tunbridge wells so I've been looking up train fare for if i visit her. The train journey is a similar amount of time to what I've been doing from essex, about 2hrs 40 minutes, but whereas i have been paying about £20 off peak and getting there at 10 am, the website says now I'd have to pay £32 off peak to arrive at 12pm, and if i wanted to get there earlier it'd be £60 or so. As a student i cant afford that as a regular trip, there must be some cheaper way of doing it without wasting all day, i don't get how it's so much more expensive for a similar journey.


Do you have a railcard? It'll knock a 1/3 of the price off.
Is it with the same company?
Original post by suiagg
I'm going to uni in southampton soon and my girl friend lives in tunbridge wells so I've been looking up train fare for if i visit her. The train journey is a similar amount of time to what I've been doing from essex, about 2hrs 40 minutes, but whereas i have been paying about £20 off peak and getting there at 10 am, the website says now I'd have to pay £32 off peak to arrive at 12pm, and if i wanted to get there earlier it'd be £60 or so. As a student i cant afford that as a regular trip, there must be some cheaper way of doing it without wasting all day, i don't get how it's so much more expensive for a similar journey.


It's always more expensive at peak times - that's when most people need/want to travel. The only ways around expensive tickets is to either travel outside of peak times or look up cheap rail tickets on line - there are a couple of decent companies who sell them. There's also a thing called ticket splitting in which you buy separate tickets for the same journey e.g. imagine you're travelling from London to Newcastle without getting off the train, you buy tickets which cover loads of different stops e.g. London to Cambridge, Cambridge to Ely, Ely to etc until it gets to Newcastle. It's still a direct route without any changes or getting off the train - you just have loads of tickets for one journey instead of one ticket. It works out much cheaper. There's a website which does all the work for you and works out the cheapest split tickets.

Have a look online at split ticketing or off peak cheap tickets. I've personally managed to get a 30 quid journey down to 6 quid. Saves me a fortune.

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Original post by suiagg
The money quoted is with a railcard


Ignore my first post now!

Immguessing the coach is out thn window as it would take forever?

You might just have to pay it or see each other less which may be hard I know.
Reply 6
Original post by MeYou2Night
Do you have a railcard? It'll knock a 1/3 of the price off.


Yeah, without the railcard its up in the £90s
Original post by suiagg
I'm going to uni in southampton soon and my girl friend lives in tunbridge wells so I've been looking up train fare for if i visit her. The train journey is a similar amount of time to what I've been doing from essex, about 2hrs 40 minutes, but whereas i have been paying about £20 off peak and getting there at 10 am, the website says now I'd have to pay £32 off peak to arrive at 12pm, and if i wanted to get there earlier it'd be £60 or so. As a student i cant afford that as a regular trip, there must be some cheaper way of doing it without wasting all day, i don't get how it's so much more expensive for a similar journey.


Have you tried breaking into separate journeys, such as Southampton > Waterloo and Waterloo East > Tunbridge Wells, etc? Often splitting the journeys onto different tickets comes out cheaper. You can also try smaller splits within journeys, for example, to Winchester and then to Woking, then Waterloo and so on. It's fiddly, but you can often get cheaper tickets that way.

Another thing to look at is if you use a student Oyster, you only buy your train ticket as far as the Oyster limit, as Oyster will be cheaper for both legs into London than national rail fares that way, but perhaps you aren't in London and don't use one.
Does it make any difference if you book in advance?

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