Train fares - finding advance purchase tickets

Telegraph_Sam

Anyone know of a "clever" way of checking the availability of advance purchase tickets if the date of travel is a. flexible but b. within the 10 - 12 week timeframe within which advance purchase tickets have already been released? I am speculating that not all released tickets are automatically taken up immediately. The fallback is to trial-and-error day by day through e.g. the East Coast Main Line website which is kinda tedious when the majority of allocations have been sold out.

Mids_Costcutter

Sam, I don't know of a 'clever' way but on the East Coast web site you can sign up for a cheap tickets alert i.e. advance tickets if you specify dates of travel:

http://www.eastcoast.co.uk/travel-information/Advanced-Ticket-Alert/

This would save checking the web site every day. Once you receive your alert you could then check some of the preceding days for better deals.

Livingthedream

I think I know what your on about, you want to go from A to B but your not to fussed with the dates, anytime from now upto the next ten weeks. Well if this is correct the only advice I can give is this;

1. Avoid Fridays and Sundays, weekend commuters buy these tickets very quickly so demand is high
2. Wednesday and Saturdays, these I find are the best/cheapest days of the week to travel, so check these days first, then either side of Wednesday to lenghen or shorten your stay, ie Sat to Thurs or Tues to Sat

But it would be nice if the Train companies introduced something like this which is for Mobitix tickets, were you could enter your journey details then the system gives a week by week account of what days had cheap advance tickets left.

How silly of me to forget to mention about Virgin Trains Best Fare Finder, works the same as the Mobitix system but the only caveat is that its only for Virgin Network stations and by certain Virgin train Routes

_ollie_

The Trainline does have a best fare finder, as with Virgin it doesn't cover all routes, but it covers what could be considered popular routes.

http://www.thetrainline.com/farefinder/