This is the Great British Rail Sale, a government-inspired campaign to get leisure travellers back onto the railway, but only to certain destinations off-peak during a specific five week period until the tickets run out. You'll already know about this, it launched with a major fanfare last week, indeed you may already have snapped up some bargains. I have.
This is I think the first outing of the Great British Railways brand, or at least the 'Great' bit, other than the launch of a competition to locate the organisation's new HQ. Previously separate operators ran their own occasional promotions but this is one unified campaign under a single 50% umbrella, which may or may not be an improvement. Also it's more a Great English Rail Sale because the main operators for Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland aren't taking part.
The big deal is the release of over 1 million discounted tickets, and not as it says on the website 'over 1 million discounted moments' because that's meaningless copywriting codswallop of the highest order. Which routes are included can only be discovered by entering a starting station and seeing what crops up, which is a bit annoying if you're in London because you have to try each of its dozen termini separately.
The website doesn't let you buy tickets direct, it merely suggests other operators who'll sell you them, including most of the main train companies but also digital dealers like Trip, Omio, Redspottedhanky, Railsmartr and Trainhugger. If you want to pay 45% extra for your ticket to Luton Airport Parkway by all means get yours from Trainline, but the canny traveller knows to stick with standard companies that don't charge a booking fee.
The requisite travel period runs from 25th April to 27th May, a five week period that cunningly contains only four weekends. Restricting the sale to off-peak advance tickets also means you'll probably have to set off after 9.30am, making long distance day trips less effective, plus there's the usual risk that the weather on your chosen day will turn out to be terrible. But you can still book tickets until next Monday, and some are absolute bargains, so it might be worth having a look.
I set myself an overall budget of £50 and dived in.
Top of my list was a trip to Cardiff, because that's the discount journey I was supposed to be making the weekend after lockdown and so obviously never happened. But a discounted single from London to Cardiff would have cost £25, i.e. £50 for a return journey, and that'd be my entire budget blown in one go. Also the discount ticket I bought in 2020 only cost £30 because GWR were much more generous then than the government is being now, so £50 doesn't sound that great. For these reasons I did not book a trip to Cardiff (and I fear 'nationalisation' means it'll never be that cheap again).
Next I checked out my list of "the largest English towns I haven't been to". This suggested I needed to go to Sunderland, and hurrah Sunderland was in the sale supposedly for £13. I couldn't find any £13 tickets, though, either because they'd sold out or because they were only available via a minor train operator at times designed to suit residents of the North East, not Southerners. Ditto Huddersfield, alas, not to mention Hartlepool, Warrington and Shrewsbury. Not this time, dammit.
Also certain train operators' tickets are so expensive that even 50% off is extortionate. Services on the West and East Coast main lines are the worst offenders, closely followed by GWR, EMR and SWR. In some cases slower non-express services provide better value but at the expense of extended journey time, so I'm sorry to Liverpool, Manchester and points north but now is not your time. Last autumn I managed to buy very cheap LNER tickets to Newark, Grantham and York but there's nothing so generous here so I didn't bite.
Whatever, I managed to book myself six separate days out without getting close to breaking the bank. That's one a week, which'll be excellent, plus an extra bonus trip this weekend. I've booked one trip to a city I really should have visited by now and haven't, one to a county town I've somehow thus far avoided, one to an old favourite I fancied going back to, one to a jumping-off point from which I can explore further, one to a town no sane tourist would ever visit and at least one to the seaside. So that'll do nicely.
I went on my first day trip yesterday, but spent almost as long on trains as I spent at my destination so won't be blogging about it today. Have patience.
And lovely though it was to travel a long way for almost nothing, a month-long off-peak ticket sale is no way to attract customers back onto the railways long term. Come June all the expensive tickets to mid-range destinations are back again, and cross country leisure travel returns to being an occasional luxury, not an everyday treat.
