Best rail ticket website

The smart money is on www.nationalexpresseastcoast.com despite its name it covers all National Rail, not just its own bit. A nice interface, good at picking cheap fares and even has a system for letting you know when booking opens. Copes well with railcards and lets you reserve cycle space though I had problems with this when buying a special low price ticket. It automatically reserved me a seat (no problem) but then greyed out the cycle reservation option, which it wouldn't let me take before I'd picked the ticket. I had to phone up the rain company and reserve the space (they did it well without fuss) but NEEC need to fix the bug.

New c2c ticket machines

c2c's Commuter News (September 08) reports that they are installing new ticket machines along their route by November 2008.

Amongst the features of the new machines they highlight is the ticket collection on departure facility "so you can order and pay for your ticket on line ... and collect it on the day you want to travel from the station you want to start from".

I don't think this is exactly right. Currently you can collect tickets ordered on line from any ticket machine that supports the TOD feature from not long after you order and pay for it. The 4 big blue ticket machines at Barking already support the feature. Online ticket websites for some reason ask you where you want to collect your ticket and warn you if the station you choose is not on the journey the ticket is for, yet it does not matter which compatible machine you use to collect it.

If you have bougfh tickets in advance I would advise collecting them sooner rather than later, from you nearest/most convenient TOD compatible machine. If you leave it till the day of travel and somehing goes wrong it could disrupt your journey. Why risk it?

Online train ticket booking

http://www.nationalexpresseastcoast.com/

This site was tipped by A to B magazine in its May 08 issue (no 65). They say "it accepts cycle as well as seat reservations. No word yet on whether this actually works". There's apparently no booking fee and there's Fastticket support. The interface is very impressive. I like the way you can click on a train by time and the screen updates to show you the fare you would pay.

The Trainline

Train ticket guru Barry Doe does not recommend the trainline for buying tickets on line. One reason he gives is the £1 minimum fee charged (which Raileasy also charges, and which he also doesn't recommend). He points out that if you start from http://www.nationalrail.co.uk/ (a good journey planning / ticket price site, he says) you will click through to a train operating company's (TOC's) ticket buying site. Many, but not all TOCs don't charge a fee even though the ticket "engine" is the same one.

Fastticket machines and The trainline

Twice now I have ordered tickets on the internet from The Trainline and all I have had to to collect them at Barking is press one (on screen) button and put my bank card in the slot. The tickets are printed without me having to enter the code that The Trainline supplied. Also, it seems that the payment is taken when the ticket is printed and not when it is ordered.