York to London via Train

nationalrail.co.uk is the website I use. It shows all trains, operated by all rail companies. When you select the train you want, you will be transferred to the appropriate company's website to make the purchase. If you have trouble paying with your credit card, you may need to contact your card company and notify it that you're making a foreign purchase. If still no luck, try to use PayPal. If you continue to have problems, try buying from loco2.com.

This website provides comprehensive information about rail travel in Britain and the rest of Europe: Seat 61. There's some extremely helpful advice there. Especially note that the full-fare tickets are sometimes available a bit earlier than the discount tickets, so you need to know what you expect to pay and keep watching until tickets in that general price range show up.

What I see on the NationalRail website at the moment is tickets for travel through January 30. You'll need to wait a good while before August tickets are on sale, I think. You can potentially save a very great deal of money by buying those tickets when they go on sale rather than waiting till just before your trip. I see a range from £31.50 to £131.50 per person, and I think cheaper tickets are sometimes available.

I am not an expert on British trains, but I believe the only way to get a senior discount is to buy a Senior Railcard at £30 per person. That provides a 34% discount, but if the only trip you're going to take is York to London and you plan to buy an Advance ticket very early, you will not save enough money to justify the cost of the railcard.

There's also a Two Together Railcard which costs £30 for two people and provides a similar discount. However, to use that railcard the two people must be traveling together. Again, buying an Advance ticket as soon as they are available for your travel date would be cheaper.

The railcards would potentially come into play if for some reason you do not buy your tickets early--for example, if you are not sure what date or time you want to depart and you have to wait until the summer to get your tickets. If there are no bargain tickets available by the time you are ready to buy tickets, planning to use a railcard might be the smart strategy.

Either type of railcard could be bought when you get to England, before boarding the train. You don't have to have the railcards in your possession before you buy the tickets; you must just be absolutely sure you have the railcards before you get on the train.

Tickets from about £17 per person

book as a small group and get 25% off

https://www.lner.co.uk/special-offers/travel-savings/savings-for-small-groups/

Two train companies serve that route: LNER and Grand Central https://www.grandcentralrail.com/

National Rail has a page giving the release dates on Advances for all operators here.

Lowest regular Advance fare one way is £17, but is sometimes as low as £10. Tickets at the cheapest end go very quickly after being released.

Since both have been mentioned above, you can't double dip with Railcards and LNER Group Save - you have to choose one discount or the other.

Thank you, Marco! I hadn't encountered that release-date webpage, and next year (for once) I'm going to be booking trains way ahead of time. This will be a big help to me.

In case I'm not the only one who has to use an old version of Internet Explorer: If that webpage looks corrupted, switch to a different browser. It's fine with Google Chrome.