Good value advance tickets ….
If you’re prepared to travel outside the peaks and avoid the busy times of Monday mornings, Friday afternoons and Sunday afternoons, there are some really good value advance booked tickets to be had.
Often these can be bought to/from stations on our line for little more than the cost of buying the ticket from the junction station for our line.
Here’s some examples of singles checked today for Tuesday 9 March lunchtime.
Remember, if you have a Railcard you pay up to 34% less:
To Birmingham
from Stockport – Standard £10.50, First £29
from Mobberley – Standard £11, First £53.50(!)
from Chester – Standard £13, First n/a
from Cuddington – Standard n/a, First n/a
To Edinburgh or Glasgow
from Manchester Piccadilly – Standard £14, First £30
from Mobberley – Standard £17.50, First £30
from Chester – Standard £28, First £AAAH!
from Cuddington – Standard £17.50, First £30
To London Euston
from Stockport – Standard £16, First £34
from Mobberley – Standard £12, First £35
from Chester – Standard £11, First £34
from Cuddington – Standard £12, First £35 (but 50 minute wait in Chester, due to poor connection. You could go for a tea and a snack in Carriages by the station entrance, a great environment!)
If you’re not in a rush, consider going via Wrexham and using Wrexham & Shropshire’s superb service. They’ve just come top of the Passenger Focus survey with a rating of 98%, way ahead of the competition. If you travel with them, you’ll know why!
From Wrexham to London Marylebone – Standard £10 single, First £55 single
To Norwich
from Stockport £13
from Mobberley £AHHHH!
from Chester £AHHHH!
from Cuddington £AHHHH!
(Suggestion – buy a local fare to Stockport and the Advance Purchase to Norwich and give yourself plenty of time to make the connection to allow for the occasionally arising problems).
The Benefits:
- often it’s cheaper to buy tickets to/from your local station to your destination than it is to buy from the junction station (Chester / Stockport / Manchester Piccadilly) plus the local add on.
- also, if you buy from your local station and the connection fails for whatever reason, you will be allowed to travel on the next available train at no extra cost.
The Downside:
- the way the system works, it works out the best connections and the advance purchase fares are only available on these. This is fine until the connection fails, but then for our line it’s usually a 1 hour wait for the next train.
I regularly go to London from Mobberley. If our train is late and I miss the connection, there’s another one 20 minutes later, so only a 20-30 minute late arrival into Euston.
It’s different on the return. The advance purchase ticket puts me on the 20 minutes past the hour (xx20) from Euston, due into Stockport at 17 minutes past the hour (xx17). Our local service leaves at xx30 and is usually on time. Trains from London are often delayed 15-20 minutes due to the continuing signalling and overhead wire problems on the West Coast Main Line. Thus, it is not ususual to arrive into Stockport at xx35, missing the xx30 to Mobberley. You might think that an easy way around this would be to catch the earlier train from Euston to give a longer connection time. However, with advance purchase tickets the system won’t allow this.
With a Standard Class anytime single at £134.50 and a First Class at £201, it makes sense to buy the advance tickets if possible, but then you’re stuck with the risky connection.
In my experience around 25% of my trains from London miss the connection at Stockport. They have got used to me in the Unity pub (on the other side of the A6 from Macdonalds) where I arrive with my Virgin Trains Compensation Form to complete whilst supping a great pint of Robinsons Unicorn Bitter. They even start pulling it as I walk in the front door! (The buffet on Stockport Station closes at 8.30pm).
Sure, I get my Virgin National Rail refund vouchers (25% of the fare paid if you’re 1 hour or more late – I think the most miserly of any of the train operating companies!), but I really would rather get home on time. Yet, how do I justify paying £269 Standard Class return or £402 First Class return, when I can do it for much less with advanced purchase tickets? And yet the system won’t let me build in the extra connection time, since it won’t sell me an advance ticket to do that. And that ends up costing Virgin money, too!
Moral? I’m sure there is one somewhere. Until I find it, I recommend the Unicorn Bitter at the not so salubrious Unity. If marooned at Piccadilly, there’s a very good pub with Jennings on hand pump just the other side of the road junction from the newish entrance. At Chester, there’s Carriages (though no real ale) and also The Queen Hotel, which usually does have real ale.
I’d still rather get home on time!
If you know of other good value advance purchase tickets to/from our line, please let us know ….
6 comments 
Category:
February 8th, 2010 at 11:34 am
There’s some very good information here. I’m personally aware of some information on train tickets that I’ve found out when looking for train tickets for myself that other people may find useful.
Relating to northbound London services advance fares. On Saturdays advance fares for London to Knutsford are available for the xx:40 departures from London, although it doesn’t seem to be the case on weekdays for some reason. If you get an advance for the xx:40 departure the quickest way to Knutsford is to alight at Crewe, catch the shuttle to Chester and then the Manchester bound train but I think you can use any services north of Crewe (as the reservation part of the ticket says ‘London to Crewe on xx:40 service’ and the other part says ‘London to Knutsford Route:WCML+connections’) meaning if that service is late you could go via Stockport instead of waiting around for an hour.
If you travel at the weekend and want to go First Class it’s sometimes cheaper to buy a Standard Class and pay the supplement to upgrade.
Megatrain.com do selected £5 advance tickets on Sheffield-Norwich. I think there’s also a 50p booking fee.
If you do Knutsford-Newcastle on a standard return ticket, it’s around £5 cheaper to buy a Route:Stockport ticket over a Route:Manchester ticket. (Route:Stockport being a change at Stockport and either Sheffield or Doncaster which is usually quicker or an equal journey time compared with via Huddersfield).
Between Knutsford and certain places in Greater Manchester it’s cheaper to buy a new ticket at Manchester. One such example is Knutsford to Stalybridge and breaking your ticket also means you have one Manchester CTLZ ticket allowing you to use the Metrolink between Piccadilly and Victoria for no additional charge.
February 8th, 2010 at 1:36 pm
Thanks, Steve. Very interesting.
It’s amazing how this can vary from station to station.
I knew about Newcastle. In my case from Mobberley, only 4 minutes away from Knutsford, the Newcastle options printed on the ticket are route Sheffield or route Manchester. The nicest way for me to get to Newcastle from Mobberley using the first train of the morning is via Doncaster catching an East Coast service which uses a Mallard (Mk IV) set and has free wifi in Standard Class. Returning, I was advised by Passenger Focus some years ago (and I have it in writing) that if I come back via Manchester, they just charge me half the difference. However, this is so complicated to get right on the AVantix portable ticket machines, most of the conductors say they’ll come back, but then don’t!
There are no tickets from Mobberley to Newcastle, Durham or Darlington valid via “Any Reasonable Route” (i.e. where you can buy a return and go out via Doncaster and return via Manchester), though by chance I discovered last year there are to stations on the Bishop Auckland branch from Darlington!
February 8th, 2010 at 10:17 pm
I have had 3 emails (not comments on the blog) so far today suggesting that my criticism of Virgin’s service on the West Coast Mainline (WCML) was misplaced. I think they’ve missed the point.
For those of you who don’t know, the service to/from Euston fell apart around 3pm this afternoon (after my post) when the overhead wires came down at Berkhamstead (yet again!)
It’s all very well criticisers watching this from the comfort of their PC. Some of us have to put up with this on a regular basis.
It’s now after 10pm and looking at the arrivals board for Euston, it’s a sorry state.
Believe me. I haven’t got it in for Virgin. I’m very sorry for Virgin and their staff, especially for their front line staff. It must be very demoralising for them having to put up with this continuing disruption week in, week out.
Who said the WCML was completed?
My next trip over it is on Thursday, out and back.
Wish me luck!
February 10th, 2010 at 3:54 pm
We certainly don’t have 140mph titling trains on the WCML which was the original intention.
How does the modernised WCML actually compare to the ECML now-a-days? I’ve personally had two bad experiences on the ECML – one being a 12 minute delay caused a missed connection and an hour delay overall, the other more serious one being a Voyager taking 3½ hours to do Edinburgh-Newcastle as overhead lines had failed and GNER services were stranded and blocked the lines.
I think with reliability it partly depends on which service you catch – I used to catch the St-Annes-on-Sea to Greenbank service which was quite often around 10 minutes late so from my experience morning trains on our line were quite often late, but I quite often saw the 080x Chester to Manchester service leave on time so regular passengers on that service certainly didn’t experience the delays that I experienced.
February 12th, 2010 at 9:08 am
I thought you’d like to hear how my Thursday trip went!
My morning meeting in London was cancelled, though the afternoon one was still on. So I thought, for a change, I’d try going the long way round via Sheffield on an Advance Purchase Ticket. £23 for a 1st Class Single (£15 Standard) to St Pancras from Stockport (no advance option available from Mobberley).
The trip was good. A refurbished East Midlands class 158 to Sheffield (no 1st class on these), a good attentive trolley service, (though I’d bought my tea from the privately-owned LK Gourmet outlet by Stockport ticket office which provides a mix of organic and Fairtrade products), great views through the Hope Valley and on time into Sheffield.
Then an East Midlands class 222 set (they used to be called Meridians, I don’t know whether they still are). They’re a slightly later version of the class 220 Virgin (now Cross Country) Voyagers, the seats are much better (wouldn’t be difficult!), and it seemed to have a few less rattles than in a Voyager, though not a lot less. And still with the intrusive engine noise and vibrations of a Voyager – poor when compared to the Chester-based class 175s. The on board 1st service was similar to Virgin’s, and with a hot option. Tea, coffee, biscuits and fruit are complimentary in 1st, the rest is reasonably priced. No wifi, though. Different scenery for a change, my first sight of the newish East Midlands Parkway Station right by Trent Power Station and an on time arrival into St Pancras with its wonderful trainshed and Eurostars. Then an easy Underground transfer to my meeting by Baker Street station.
Coming back, I used the WCML …. and it was good. That’s what’s so infuriating about the WCML. Often it’s good, but when it has its problems, it can be terrible!
No Londons next week for me next week, just local, Liverpool and Leeds.
February 26th, 2010 at 8:30 pm
The £10 advance tickets for the first southbound Wrexham and Shropshire arriving at London at 08:57 look excellent value for money. It’s a shame Northern Rail don’t start early enough in the morning to connect with one of these services.
You can drive to Crewe and catch the Arriva Trains Wales service to Shrewsbury in time to pick up that train, but then you’re relying on a car to use public transport!