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the 11.11 train is £23....

I think the Londoners all beat me to the advance fares or something. Only 1 of our group has a car so we might fork out for a rental & go in 2 cars. So much for save the environment use public transport eh, lets bump up the prices & force everybody onto the roads.

So I ended up going for the festival bus. Should have bought it at early bird price, but as it turns out it's probably going to be much cheaper anyway. Stupid trains!!

but for future - the best priced tickets do not go on sale 12 weeks before the date of travel any more. If you go to the websites three months before the prices will be very high, and possibly as high as if you bought on the day. Rather, what you really have to to do now is check once a week from about 9 weeks downwards - sooner or later the cheap tickets will be released. The very, very cheapest prices can sometimes be got a day or two before travel now, because they are trying to flog the last remaining seats. Bit of a risk waiting and hoping for this to happen though.

In a way this makes more sense than the old system, because they would rather sell out of seats at the expensive prices. If they fail to do this, then prices come down.

I'm hoping to find someone with a car who wants to stay in a chalet - if not I've got a long cycle from Manchester

priced tickets for any destination?

I fail to see why there's any need to have more than six varieties of ticket: Single (Peak), Return (Peak), Single (Off Peak), Return (Off Peak) and then Single/Return railcard variants.

This country is ridiculous.

and as someone who watched daily to get Brighton to Notts tickets home for Xmas for £18 you can do alright out of it. Brighton to Taunton can still be done for about £30 both ways, that's not bad.

I don't know whether this is the case on the Leeds route, but for every ATP so far we've been able to get groupsave tickets from London, which means 4 travel for the price of 2 off peak, it's flexible return and you can buy them on the day of travel. You must travel together both ways, though, or the greedy bastards will make you buy a new ticket.

I've noticed you can't get the cheapest tickets if your route involves travelling with more than one company. As such it may be cheaper to treat a long rail trip as two seperate journeys; the last couple of times I went up to Leeds (from South Wales) I went via London or Manchester. In some cases you can actually get a cheaper ticket to a station further down the line! (though this is supposedly disallowed). The whole situation is plain ludicrous.