What is the best way to travel in England and Scotland by train: tickets or railpass? Do we have to get seat reservations with tickets?with a pass? We will be going from Manchester to London then to Stirling Scotland and back to Manchester mid September
Posted by
Santa Maria, California, USA
31 posts
I bought several UK train tickets this past weekend. They were for specific trains (which really lowered the price) and they made seat assignments after asking my preferences. If it's a popular time/route, that's probably a good thing. (When we went to Munich during 2005 Oktoberfest, we had assigned seats and all those who didn't had to stand.)
I don't know how railpasses work. Hopefully someone else will comment on that.
Posted by
Austin, Texas, USA
573 posts
I just returned from England and Scotland and decided to get the pass. After pricing out my routes, it was a better deal for me. Reservations were not required for some of my routes. Other routes were easy to get reservations for and can easily be done at a train station in London or where ever you are. The one curveball I had was that my London to York route on a Sunday was completely sold out. They were not giving out any more reservations. I had to show up early, get on the train, and look for seats without reservation tickets on them and snag them. Luckily I did that because there were many people who showed up last minute and stood the whole two hours or waited for some one to get off to get their seat. My lesson learned was to get reservations for the popular routes further in advance.