Buying Oyster Card & Rail Passes Stateside?

IMO, there is no advantage to buying an Oyster card stateside. It will cost more and it's simple to buy it when you get to London.

You cannot buy BritRail passes in the UK. You must buy them stateside.

I agree with Tim. It's easy to purchase the Oyster Card in London. Unless there's some special deal for buying it together with the railpass, I'd wait.

I'm presuming you're flying into Heathrow. There's a manned booth to buy your Oyster Card at the bottom of the escalator leading to the tube and/or Heathrow Express. Put 10 or 15 pounds on each card and that'll cover you for at least a week. Easy to top off at any tube station in London if you run short. BritRail Passes must be purchased in the U.S.

Tim, how do you have words in bold when you put a post in?

Amy,

You use HTML formatting tags for bold. Type "<". Type "b". Type ">". Type the text you want to be bold. Type "<". Type "/b". Type ">". (Omit the quotation marks when you do the actual typing.)

For italics you do the same thing using an "i" rather than a "b".

So it looks like <b>Text</b>.

But I used another trick, called HTML (&) codes. If I had written it exactly like that <b>Text</b> it would have look like this Text.