National Rail - National Rail Ticketing - D

National Rail - D

National Rail Ticketing

National Rail services have a common ticketing structure inherited from British Rail. Through tickets are available between any pair of stations on the network, and can be bought from any station ticket office. Most tickets are inter-available between the services of all operators on routes appropriate to the journey being made. Operators on some routes offer operator-specific tickets that are cheaper than the inter-available ones.

Through tickets involving London Underground, or to some ferry services (RailSail tickets) are also available. Oyster pay-as-you-go can be used on National Rail in Greater London from 2 January 2010. These same areas can also be journeyed to using a contactless debit/credit card. Contactless also covers some areas that Oyster doesn't such as the Crossrail line to Reading, or the Thameslink station at Oakleigh Park.

The most common types of tickets available include 'advance' tickets, that specify a specific route and timing between two destinations, 'off-peak' tickets, either as a single or a return, that allow a passenger to use a train at hours where the service is not busy, and 'anytime' tickets, which can be used on any train. Season tickets, which offer unlimited travel between two stations for a specified period, are also available.

A 'rover' travel card ticket also exists that allows unlimited travel in a set area or on services of certain operators, for a certain period of time. Rovers which allow unlimited travel for only one day are sometimes referred to as ranger tickets, and are usually available for smaller areas.

Passengers without a valid ticket boarding a train at a station where ticket-buying facilities are available are required to pay the full Open Single or Return fare. On some services penalty fares apply - a ticketless passenger may be charged the greater of £20 or twice the full single fare to the next stop. Penalty Fares can be collected only by authorised Revenue Protection Inspectors, not by ordinary Guards.

National Rail distributes a number of technical manuals on which travel on the railways in Great Britain is based, such as the National Rail Conditions of Travel, via their website.

National Rail Timetables

Pocket timetables for individual operators or routes are available free at staffed stations. The last official printed timetable with up to 3000 pages was published in 2007. Now the only complete print edition is published by Middleton Press (as of October 2016). A digital version of the full timetable is available as a pdf file without charge on the Network Rail website, however, passengers are recommended to obtain their timetables from the individual train companies.

National Rail Overview

National Rail Product Type: Public transport

National Rail Owner: Rail Delivery Group

Country United Kingdom

National Rail Introduced: 1999, 24 years ago

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