If you live in the UK you should be familiar with the railcards, as they give you a discount of 34% on the (ridiculously) expensive train tickets. I was once young too and had the 16-25 / 25-30 railcards, but those good times are gone.

A less useful or known one is the Network Railcard. It is available to anyone, but has tougher restrictions. It is valid only in Southeast England, and there’s a £13 minimum fare for travelling on weekdays.

It still has value though, as it covers a few major cities including London, Birmingham, Oxford, Cambridge, Bristol and Brighton. The reduction also works on airport trains to/from Luton, Stansted and Gatwick.

Even if you don’t travel outside London, the Network Railcard can buy you a discounted weekend Travelcard for London too, although it needs a workaround which I only found out by accident recently.

You can’t just buy the Travelcard straightaway, instead you need to search for a day return ticket between two London stations. This is what LNER offers for London Waterloo – Hampton Court with a Network Railcard:

As you can see, there’s a £10 Day Travelcard option which is valid for Zone 1-6. For comparison the regular price is £15.2, and Oyster daily cap is £14.9. Note that you must collect your paper ticket at a train station, as there’s no facility to do that in a tube station. The ticket is valid for tube / bus travels within Zone 6 and you don’t have to commence your travel at the station you selected.

A Network Railcard usually costs £30, but there are always some sales going on. Trip.com tends to offer it for less than £20, although do check the restrictions as you may need to buy a train ticket to activate the railcard.

Uber launched a railway ticket booking service in partnership with Omio a couple of months ago. The platform has now expanded to include National Express too, with a nice cashback promotion.

You can access the service via the Travel section in the Uber app.

It works just like any other online ticket retailers. You can apply a railcard and purchase any ticket type including Advance. You can book National Express and Eurostar too (as it’s backed by Omio).

By the end of this year, you earn 10% cashback in Uber credit for all your bookings. The cashback is deposited into your account within 10 days of the completion of your travel, and is valid for 180 days.

I made a dummy booking, and it turns out you can redeem your credit on Uber Travel like for rides and takeaways. If you’ve bought discounted Uber gift cards (e.g. via Morrisons or Monese offers), buying train tickets on Uber Travel saves you up to an additional 30%!

If you travel between London / North England / Scotland often, you should probably join LNER’s new rewards scheme – Perks.

Perks membership is available via LNER’s mobile app.

• You are gifted £5 credit upon sign-up
• You can earn 2% back in credit for each LNER (part of full) journey taken
• Credit can be used towards LNER advance ticket purchase

Interestingly, you don’t need to book via LNER to earn the 2% credit. For third-party bookings you can upload your ticket within the last 7 days in the app to claim the credit. You can also earn credit on LNER season tickets but only if you book with them directly.

Even if you only travel on LNER once, it may be worth downloading their app for the £5 saving. I decided to give them a try for an upcoming trip and noticed that they’ve got something called Smart Save:

It’s basically Split Ticketing, but as LNER is doing it directly I assume it’s executed better than other retailer platforms. And in this case, Smart Save stacked with the £5 credit did save me a decent amount!

It’s a bit confusing how you can buy train tickets in the UK: the national rail network is operated by many different companies who have their own online booking sites, and there are a few third-party websites that sell train tickets too.

In fact, the inventory and prices are, most of the time, identical across all these platforms, so you could really just use any of the rail company’s websites as they don’t charge any booking fee or credit card fee. Some of them also offer a small incentive such as Nectar points.

An alternative has emerged in the last couple of years though, namely Trainpal, which is owned by the giant Chinese travel agency Ctrip. It has access to the same inventory with other ticket selling services, and also has a few advantages:

• No additional fee charged
• Split ticketing offered for free – if the journey can be cheaper by booking two separate tickets, it will show up in the search results as an option
• Frequent promotions for vouchers

For example they have been selling gift vouchers recently:

You can pay 49p for two £3 vouchers (minimum spend applies). It’s a pretty good deal, and you even get automatically refunded if you have no use for them and let the vouchers expire.

If you take the train regularly it may be a good idea to download the app as a new option. Feel free to use my referral code a25d5733 which should give you a £3 voucher to start with (£40 minimum spend applies).

Instead of booking a first-class train ticket directly, it’s widely known that you could just purchase a standard-class ticket on a weekend train, and pay a premium to upgrade to first class on the spot. Seatfrog, a recently emerged app, is providing us with a new option.