Network railcard

olb81

A few people i know have one for 35 a year which gives them a third off every journey and soon pays for itself. Is it defo worth getting one?

pmduk

only you can answer that. Consider how often you travel and the amount you pay. Check the effect of any time restrictions on your calculations.

2childmum2

And also whether it covers all the areas you travel to

p00hsticks

As others have said you'd need to look at the restrictions and benefits and see if it works out money saving for the journeys you make. 

You can only use it after 10am Mondays to Fridays and there is also a minimum fare of £13 during the week.
Unlike the various national railcards, it's also restricted in area
Using your Railcard - Network Railcard

P-Nuts

I think It’s the only railcard you can get if you’re not young, old, disabled, or two people, though it’s only any use in the bizarrely-shaped area it covers, and that’s subject to a lot of restrictions. For going further afield, sometimes you can get creative with a split ticket to a station just inside the boundary. But sometimes advance tickets are cheaper anyway, and the railcard is useless for those.

It pays for itself within three or four trips to London for me.

The good thing is now you can buy it online, so when it expires I don’t rush to renew it, I wait until the next time it will actually save me money.

Nonesuch_xx

The bizarre shaped area creates some unfairness.

Some very long journeys covered, while some equally long ones are not. boundary fares (for holders of TfL season tickets and some concessions) are only possible in the network card zone as well (which is really arbitrary)

The shape is a legacy of the "network southeast" operating region of British rail era.

Ripe for a review by new GB railways.

A fairer option that doesn't give away too much revenue in discounts is to split the whole of the UK into sensible overlapping regions for railcard purposes (network card region split into 4 - 6) with no odd shapes (like the network card "finger" which includes King's Lynn in Norfolk but does not cover the lines into Norfolk Eastwards from Cambridge/Ely). Longer journeys can be discounted as long as you have all the regional cards needed to cover the whole (and if you have one regional card then additional cards can be bought at a steep discount).  The cards to replace current Network card would overlap within TfL zones.  And I appreciate that it would not be as good a deal as current Network railcard, but certainly more equitable across the UK (the current regional railcard are not as useful and not all of UK is covered by a regional.  Could be a basis for further simplification of railcard into fewer variations