How to get from Oxford to Edinburgh: A saga

June 19, 2005 @ 1:57 am · Filed under Uncategorized

A couple days ago I finally found the time to figure out how we’d get from Oxford to Edinburgh on June 26th. Merely booking the travel has been an interesting experience. To wit:

  1. Late Thursday, go to a variety of British train companies’ web sites and search for direct trains from Oxford to Edinburgh. Find only one train, from Virgin Trains, leaving Oxford at 8:34 a.m. and getting into Edinburgh at 2:29 p.m.
  2. Mail Adrienne, explaining that we’ll have to leave Oxford somewhat early if we want to take that train and making sure it’s OK.
  3. Early Friday, get Adrienne’s confirmation that it’s OK.
  4. Mid-day Saturday, head on over to Virgin’s site to make the reservation. Note that the train no longer exists. Since it didn’t appear to be close to being sold out on Thursday — many classes of tickets were still available — get very confused. Spend lots of time looking for the missing train and come up empty.
  5. Start investigating alternatives. Find that there are no direct trains from Oxford to Edinburgh on the morning of June 26th. Look into other options.
  6. Find a train getting into Edinburgh at 3 p.m. with two changes for 138 pounds, one getting in at 4:30 with one change for 116 pounds, and another getting in at 6:15 with no changes for 150 pounds. Resign myself to not having any free time before dinner in Edinburgh, which would be a shame because we really don’t have much time in Edinburgh.
  7. Decide on a whim to start looking at trains from London to Edinburgh on that morning. I mean, you’d have to be insane to take the bus from Oxford to London — going away from Edinburgh, mind you — that early and then take the train from there.
  8. Find a train leaving Kings Cross station at 10:15 a.m., going directly to Edinburgh, for 106 pounds. Of course, doing that would require leaving Oxford at 7 a.m. and then taking the tube from Victoria Coach station to Kings Cross station. Completely ridiculous, but at least the train ride would be direct and we’d get to Edinburgh at 3 p.m. Mail that and the other options from Oxford to Adrienne.
  9. A few hours later, talk to Adrienne. Recommend the insane Oxford->London, Victoria Coach Station->Kings Cross Station->Edinburgh route. She’s OK with it.
  10. Head on over to TheTrainLine to make the reservation. Log in with the account that I used on Friday to make our train reservations from Edinburgh to London. I reserved those tickets to be picked up at a FastTicket kiosk at Kings Cross station because the tickets can’t be mailed overseas and we wouldn’t be here to get them anyway.
  11. Select the Kings Cross train and choose to get the tickets via the FastTicket kiosk again. Get all the way up to the billing screen, and be told that my billing address is invalid because my postcode isn’t known.
  12. Try a whole bunch of permutations of postcodes, trying to figure out what worked before. Clearly something worked before, because I have a confirmation number for the previous pair of tickets. Fail miserably. Only UK postcodes are valid. Shockingly, I don’t have one of those. Get rather annoyed at their system’s insistence that even though the account setup page allows you to select a country from a popup menu and let me set up my account with a U.S. address and I’m not asking them to ship anything, my billing address must be invalid.
  13. Try to set up a new account. Fail because it’s impossible to enter either a blank postcode or a non-UK postcode, even though the field right below that is for the country. I have no idea how I managed to set up my account in the first place.
  14. Try to purchase the ticket directly from GNER instead of from TheTrainLine. Same problem.
  15. Try to figure out how to call TheTrainLine. You can’t. Send them a slightly snarky email message about how today it’s impossible for me to order a ticket through their web site even though I successfully ordered one from the same site yesterday.
  16. Try to figure out how to call GNER. Progress — you actually can call them.
  17. Try to figure out how to call internationally without paying a million dollars a minute. My home long distance plan is essentially the “don’t use long distance or else we’ll empty out your bank account” plan, so that’s out. Wonder about international calls through my cell phone.
  18. Look at Cingular’s site. Hmm…$1.84 a minute for calling the UK. Not so good.
  19. Ah, but if you call internationally “frequently”, the rates are $0.06 a minute for calling the UK. Much better. Cost for signing up for the “frequent international caller” plan: $3.99 a month with no activation charge and no requirement to keep the plan for more than a month.
  20. Do the math and realize that if you make any call to the UK that’s at least three minutes long, you come out ahead if you sign up for the “frequent international caller” plan. I guess “infrequent” means “two minutes or less”. I love the cell phone industry.
  21. Call Cingular. Wait 15 minutes or so for the $3.99 plan to be added to my account.
  22. Call GNER, where the nice woman on the other end who must think that my accent is terribly weird is perfectly happy to place an order billed to a US address with pickup at the FastTicket kiosk at Kings Cross station.
  23. Rejoice.

And to think I thought that the only complicated part of getting from Oxford to Edinburgh would be the actual process of getting there, not the process of booking the travel. Silly me.

5 Comments

  1. Buzz Andersen Said,

    June 19, 2005 @ 8:29 am

    The British Rail system is a disaster, that’s for sure. When I had to get from London to Edinburgh a few years ago, I pretty much gave up on the whole idea of taking the train and just drove it.

  2. Daniel Jalkut Said,

    June 19, 2005 @ 8:54 am

    What a fiasco! My only question is, wouldn’t it be faster to get from Oxford to London by train, as part of you’re crazy Oxford->London->Tube->Train->Edinburgh plan?

  3. Eric Said,

    June 19, 2005 @ 11:40 am

    Ah, but that’d involve changing trains, and I’ve been told by just about everyone who’s used the British train system that train changes are best avoided because the trains often don’t run on schedule. I have more confidence on the bus and tube running on schedule on a Sunday morning than the train.

  4. Diggory Laycock Said,

    June 24, 2005 @ 3:54 am

    You can’t trust any web interface to a large public institution in the UK - I hate to even imagine how antiquated the rail booking IT system is. Most public IT systems in the UK are terrible.

    Oxford is a bit of an odd station - much more out of the way (rail-line wise) that you would think - the bus is much quicker, more direct (and cheaper) for getting to London from Oxford.

    The west-coast Train line (King’s Cross to Edinburgh) is a good, quick line - and the trains run every hour or so - shouldn’t really need to book - unless it’s friday afternoon.

  5. Jonathan Sanderson Said,

    July 28, 2005 @ 4:52 am

    See, the mistake you made here was in doing something that is out of the ordinary so far as the system is concerned. And that’s travelling North. One doesn’t do this in Britain. It’s more-or-less acceptable to return North, so long as one has previously travelled South, but travelling North for its own sake - that’s almost suspicious. Possibly you could have fooled the system by travelling West to somewhere like Gloucester; a swift change there and Britain might have been so confused by your intentions as to leave you to travel in peace.

    Your plan to utterly baffle the system by initially travelling in almost exactly the wrong direction is, therefore, a good one. though not, one suspects, optimal.

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