Virgin Trains Luggage collection/delivery service - Bag Magic

See www.virgintrains.com/bagmagic.

Virgin Trains has started a bag collection/delivery service called Bag Magic. For £9.99 a bag weighing up to 30kg can be collected from your home on Mon-Fri and delivered to your final address the next day. The price is £16.99 for two bags.

At weekends the charge is £8 (1 bag) or £14 (2 bags) but the weight limit is 20kg and you will need to take the bag to a collection point and collect it from one, too, and there's a size limit of 38 x 38 x 64cm.

Let's hope other companies will also offer this system which was universal at one time back in British Rail days.

Thanks to Barry Doe / Rail Magazine issue 763 for the information.

Cheapest Gold Cards

According to fares supremo Barry Doe, in Rail Magazine issues 761 and 763, the cheapest Gold Card - £108 at current prices - will be Lichfield Trent Valley to/from City. The former cheapest Gold Card was Ryde St Johns Road to/from Ryde Esplanade on the Isle of Wight. This now costs £164, but, if bought at a South West Trains station, it (and I assume any South West Trains Gold Card) entitles the holder to 6 free South West trains tickets in the year. This may save you more than the £56 difference in price from the Lichfield one.

The discounts obtainable with a Gold Card, which change from 2015, are explained here:http://www.nationalrail.co.uk/times_fares/ticket_types/46573.aspx

Train ticket splitting websites - save £ on train fares

Thanks to A to B magazine for pointing out https://www.splitticketing.com/ and https://raileasy.trainsplit.com/. (These are connected sites: the second can be reached via the "Need more options?" link on the first.)

The major breakthrough is that these sites can deal with more types of tickets, and you can buy tickets directly on them. The earlier sites were good for finding a split point, but then you needed to go off to another site to try out the splits on cheaper ticket types, and buy tickets.

My earlier posts on the subject are here http://stibasa.blogspot.co.uk/2014/09/tickety-split-improved-version.html and here http://stibasa.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/split-train-tickets-and-save-money.html.

You can read up on the pros and cons of ticket splitting in A to B Issue 105 or on the above mentioned sites, but the sense of ticket splitting is that you buy several tickets for a journey, costing less in total than a ticket for the whole journey, whilst travelling on exactly the same train(s). The websites work this out for you (the train has to stop where your tickets are for) and the savings can be very large.