Cheaper Travel in Scotland

In April 2013 Scottish transport minister Keith Brown announced to great fanfare that that the anomaly of split ticketing, where it can be cheaper to buy a combination of two or more train tickets for a journey instead of a conventional through ticket, would be ended in Scotland. Despite all the publicity, more than two years later, significant split fare anomalies still exist on many Scottish routes.

So how do you go about finding cheaper train tickets and how exactly does it all work? Thanks to the Trainsplit site, searching for split tickets and benefiting from the savings is a simple process. The website’s split fare finding algorithm automatically searches for split fare savings on your route and if it does find a split saving, it will automatically book the correct combination of tickets for your journey, saving you time and unnecessary hassle.

Split tickets are perfectly legal under the National Rail Conditions of Carriage as long as the train that you board stops at all the points where the train tickets have been split. The Trainsplit site only offers splits in cases where the train is scheduled to stop at the splitting points ensuring that anyone booking through the site doesn’t run the risk of making mistakes and incurring costly penalty fares.

Split fares are available on both flexible anytime and off peak tickets as well as fixed time advance fares and can be booked in conjunction with railcards including the Scottish Youth railcard in order to obtain even bigger savings on your journey.

So what split savings can you find for travel entirely in Scotland? Some good examples of Scottish split train fares include an Edinburgh- Fort William ticket. An unsplit off peak return will normally set you back £70.00 but when the fare is split the price drops to £41.60, saving a whopping £28.40. It’s a similar story with Glasgow to Inverness tickets. A split off peak return will cost you £41.00 saving you £13.40 on the unsplit price of £54.40.

Split fares obviously aren’t just limited to Scotland though, you can find them if you’re travelling over the border too. Popular cross border journeys with potential savings include Edinburgh to Newcastle where splitting an off peak single at Dunbar may save you £8.10 on the usual fare price of £48.00

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