An arm and a leg and your first-born

[ganimede]

It's just a month off my birthday now (hint hint :P) so I was talking to my sister recently about doing something for our upcoming birthdayness as hers is the following month. We're both big Harry Potter fans and both of us really really want to go to the WB Studio Tour so that seemed the obvious choice. I've been having a look at the train times

Comments

[ganimede]

I was surprised at how long it would take to get down there. Thanks to the super speedy Pendolino, it only takes 3 hours or so to get to London now, rather than the 4-5 it used to be. And I did think about staying over somewhere but that wouldn't be cheap in London. And we'd either have to carry all our stuff round with us or go back to the hotel to get it, so it'd be an additional faff.

I don't use the trainline site, I use Virgin trains because we're on the West Coast mainline and they run it. I had issues a few years ago with tickets I'd got from the trainline site - I'd got a return to London and the time coming back was wrong, it was about ten minutes after I arrived, so not unlike the issue you had. I tried to sort it out at the station here on my way down but was told there wasn't much they could do because I'd not got them from their site so I only use the Virgin one now. Plus the trainline adds a booking fee on top of the ticket price while Virgin doesn't.

Supposedly there's all these hidden cheap prices but it's a lot of faffing about and you have to know where all the trains connect so you're not going out of your way. I think there's one where you get a ticket to Crewe and then another from Crewe to London but it's actually the same train. It's just cheaper to do two tickets rather than one.

[hobbitblue]

I think it was about 2 1/2 down from Liverpool last time I went which is 8 years or so ago, tho weirdly the return journey with the exact same stops is always an hour longer (and a hellish hour when I'm tired and unwell and uncomfy and just want to get home...*sigh*) Yes, carting stuff makes things a pain.

Ah, I'll remember that should i be in a position to travel - can't believe they charge extqa when the site is crap to begin with, grr on them mucking it up also!

Oh that's tricksy... I still rememebr the old days when planning a train journey meant getting the paper timetable off the shelf and poring over it to plan a route and then going to get the ticket and there was no confusion or differfent fares or faffing about. Mind you, the German train experience was a dream, why we always have to make things over complex and challenging i'll never know. And yes, was going to say, can you fiddle somehing and not actually go into London in the first place, change at Wolverhampton or something? BUt you likley looked at that when you were cosidering Birmingham also.

[ganimede]

Getting home always seems to take longer, probably because by that point you're so tired and you just want to be home!

Charging a booking fee is so annoying, I really don't know how they can justify it. The other good thing about getting your tickets through Virgin is that they have machines at the station where you can pick up your ticket at any point before you travel, rather than waiting for it to come in the post. I think that's so convenient.

Oh, the Deutsche Bahn website is amazing. It tells you the exact time of each stop, what platform it will be at and there's maps of the stations too. We really could do with having that over here. Our ticket system is so confusing and ridiculous with all the different prices and times of validity.

I only looked at Birmingham because the Harry Potter tour site said there was a direct train to Watford Junction from there and from London Euston.

[hobbitblue]

Feeling longer is one thing, actually timetabled to take longer, but taking the same route with no extra stops or changes is just odd. I suppose getting people *to* London is much more important than bringing them back..

Oh thats v handy, well organised technology for sure :)

I've not seen the website but the man in the train office had it all on his computer (where the British ticket office at the same time 1992-3 was lookingit up on paper). Getting from Wilhelmshaven where I lived to Kiel where my bf was took 4 trains and i never worried about being late or missing a connection or being delayed, still rmember the general sigh of vague annoyace at hamburg station one time as the main train coming up from the border with Austria and heading all the way up to Denmark was announced as being a whole 10 minutes late. That would count as prompt service over here!

Helpful of them to give other options i guess.

[ganimede]

Wow, that is weird. Maybe it takes longer because it's having to go up to the North ;)

I don't know what the train service was like at that time, I didn't use it then. It's only really been the last 10 years or so that I've started using the trains so much. Possibly because I started to travel a bit further afield then, I was going to London and Manchester a lot around that time.

That's true, although it'd be nicer if there were more than just those two.

[hobbitblue]

has to stop and change into its flat cap and welly boots, do you reckon? *g*

We used to go on trains as a normal thing when i was a kid, local ones with mum when dad had the car at work in the summer but also big trips like down to London and stuff, not that often I guess but the timetable thing was sort of a ritual :)

[ganimede]

I was thinking more about it having to go against gravity but sure, that too :P