Arrival at Heathrow T3 to Train (Timing)

Thank you! It sounds as if we share similar margins of comfort/discomfort. I dislike buses, too but feel a bit edgy about all the connections being a rank newbie. The most interesting (read: puzzling) thing to me is that leaving via the all-train route an hour earlier (9:02 vs. 9:55) only saves me 30 min on the arrival vs. bus AND train (12:05 vs. 11:38).

The bus is not a citybus. It is a high quality coach with a restroom, probably better seats than on the plane, and luggage stowage in the bus hold.
Arriving off a flight tired I think the bus link is totally the right way to do the jourmey.
In the overall context of the trip the extra cost is negligible.

As a potential time saving trip, you can view kind of a photo tour of most, or possibly all stations online. If your first train change is at Paddington, which is suspect is the case, having already mapped out how to get from one platform to another could be a real plus.

At the station you will probably need to stand under one of the large and easily read monitors to see what platform you will need to use, and be aware that the train's destination may be listed as the end of the line. If you are going to get off at an intermediate stop the board may have a line that says "calling at" which would list the intermediate stops.

If you change at a small rural station there may only be two platforms so it's kinda hard to get it wrong, but be aware that the station could be unattended.

I also highly recommend visiting the website https://www.seat61.com. This guy actually knows useful stuff about trains.

That is very good to know. It's interesting that the journey with bus + train is appx 1/4 the price of the multi-connection train journey and only 30 minutes longer - AND although I'll be sitting around longer waiting to get going, I also have less chance of panicking if something takes longer. Thank you!

Regarding "panicking if something goes wrong", I'm 76 and my wife is 70. We've been blessed to do this sort of thing for a rather long and at least in our case stuff goes wrong on a very, very infrequent schedule :) On the rare occasions we have had an issue and been required to fix it, the trepidation of the event was very much worse than the actual event itself. Without fail we always end up saying something like "well, that wasn't bad at all." Just take a deep breath, utter your favorite vulgarity, and calmly look for the answer. It will be much simpler than you expect.

That's very reassuring! Although, I tried to purchase my ticket at National Rail only to be told "unable to find journey vendor." Trainline says, "Your tickets cannot be collected from Heathrow Terminal 3. You will be able to collect your ticket(s) from any other 1500 stations listed." However, the list of 1500 stations includes Heathrow Terminal 2 and 3.

Can anyone tell me what the heck this means? :-D

What it technically means is that the bus departs from outside Terminal 3 where there is no ticket machine.
The ticket machine is at the Terminal 2/3 rail station which is betwixt the two terminals, in walking distance of both. Can't this ticket type be issued as an e-ticket as opposed to a physical ticket?

It doesn't look like it. Ticket station or mail. I'm frankly beginning to suspect this journey as presented by NR and Trainline doesn't really exist. Southwestern only lists this journey as all train, 3 changes, price 87.70, same date, same departure and arrival times. July 19: 9:55 Heathrow arriving at Brockenhurst 12:05. Bewildering. I was just starting to figure out how to call NR and speak with a human.

So I called Trainline. They say tickets CAN be picked up at any ticket station - though he wouldn't quite say the pop-up was incorrect. It was really hard to decipher what he was saying due to very strong accent and a seeming unwillingness to speak plainly.

National Rail gave me a Customer Relations number to call tomorrow to make the bus reservation, as they are closed for the day.

This has really been something! I had hoped to get all this nuttiness behind me today. Ha!

I've checked.

Yes no e tickets.

To find the bus route on South Western Railway you need to enter your origin as Heathrow Terminal 3 bus (or just HWE).
That will bring up an Any time Day Single of £49.30. That is a totally flexible fare.
My other device has it up live now.

On the all Train route £87.70 is daylight robbery. I know it is the quoted fare. However if you buy it in two parts-
Off Peak Day Single Heathrow to Reading £24.30
ditto Reading to Brockenhurst £36.70
TOTAL £61
Both parts are fully flexible.
The reason for the difference is that the fare is set as going via Paddington on the Heathrow Express

Thank you! Dang, I really thought you had cracked this. But still having the problem with station selection when checking out.
When I select "Heathrow 2 and 3," it comes back with "Your selected station to collect ticket is different from your source station." Can't move on from there to checkout. Even if I change to the bus being Terminal 2, the same thing happens. Of course, selecting First Class Mail isn't a good choice, either. Gives the same error if I choose Terminal 4 for laughs. Definite glitch in their system, if you ask me.

I can't thank you enough for looking into this though - really has helped a great deal.

The whole source of this problem is that the Woking Bus stops outside arrivals at each terminal.

None of those bus stops has ticket machines beside them. At each you have to go to the machines at the rail station for each terminal.

So where it says collect tickets from the station put in HXX- the rail station at Terminal 2 and 3.

It will then tell you this is a different station, click OK through that then you can proceed to payment. You can tell I never use SWT- I didn't know their system was so antiquated as to require a named station. In practice you could collect it from Penzance or Thurso or any rail station. Most companies no longer use that system.

So you are travelling from HWE- the Terminal 3 bus stop, first you will have to walk underground to HXX- the Terminal 2/3 rail station for your ticket, then back to the Terminal 3 bus stop Stop 7 and 8.

See google maps for how close the rail station is to Terminal 3-https://www.google.co.uk/maps/place/London+Heathrow+Airport+T2+and+T3/@51.4701752,-0.4586953,18z/data=!4m15!1m8!3m7!1s0x4876722d2ea4af91:0x8e7ff98424b860ff!2sTerminal+3,+Nelson+Rd,+Longford,+Hounslow+TW6+1QG!3b1!8m2!3d51.4704309!4d-0.4592907!16s%2Fm%2F0ndhhhh!3m5!1s0x487673cca7a8287d:0x54fc720b10adfc52!8m2!3d51.47109!4d-0.45349!16s%2Fg%2F1z44rtkwb?entry=ttu

You are my hero! I'm so glad for all of this info - you've demystified the process of ticket pick-up to a huge degree.

I lost at least an hour fighting the registration Southwestern form to buy the ticket. It INSISTED I enter UK as my address not US. After googling around, etc., trying to find out what to do, I just gave in and entered UK. It then let me proceed to purchase the ticket. Insanity.

After all that, I received a confirmation email showing the journey as 3:55 - 6:05!!! However, the screen shows 09:55 - 12:05, so I'm left to assume that being as the system now knows I'm in the US, it added 6 hours. ? Bonkers.

Wow. What a trying internet day this has been. Thank you again for helping me!