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I always recommend this site to anybody booking a train, it's by some distance the best available in the UK.

rwmj 9y ago
Especially since the official site (http://www.nationalrail.co.uk/ http://www.nationalrail.co.uk/) has been broken for a few months if you have NoScript, even if you enable all of the 30 or so Javascript sources. The technical problem is that if you visit the site at all without Javascript, it puts a cookie in an incorrect path, which causes all subsequent searches on the site to fail (even with full JS). Despite my attempts to get past the front line support I've still not found anyone there who is able to understand why this would be a problem. This level of incompetence makes me wonder about the whole operation. It was actually the thing that made me switch to using http://traintimes.org.uk/ http://traintimes.org.uk/ permanently.
refrigerator 9y ago
Never heard of it, but looks pretty great. Have you tried the Trainline app? If so, how does this conpare? Cheers
- ratherbefuddled 9y ago
  Trainline is a fairly typical commercial website. It won't work without javascript and cookies enabled, it wants to track you, it doesn't follow accessibility guidelines and is over a megabyte and a half in size. If you access it on a mobile device it has the usual annoying ad for the pointless mobile app (complete with onerous Ts & Cs, overly grasping permissions and invasive privacy policy) covering a quarter of the screen with the tiny dismiss button. In short, everything that's wrong with web development these days and defensible only because it's one of many. By contrast traintimes.org.uk is simple, highly usable, small, accessible, respectful of privacy and works as plain html. For me it's an easy choice but your mileage may vary!
  - dracos 9y ago
    Just to note, though, that you can book tickets with Trainline, which you can't with traintimes.org.uk, it does have limits :) However, Trainline charge a booking fee – https://ehelp.thetrainline.com/app/answers/popup_detail/a_id/2825/rdr/10 https://ehelp.thetrainline.com/app/answers/popup_detail/a_id... – and so I would suggest using any train operating company site (they all sell nearly all tickets), whichever one you find most agreeable.

rwmj 9y ago

Especially since the official site (http://www.nationalrail.co.uk/ http://www.nationalrail.co.uk/) has been broken for a few months if you have NoScript, even if you enable all of the 30 or so Javascript sources. The technical problem is that if you visit the site at all without Javascript, it puts a cookie in an incorrect path, which causes all subsequent searches on the site to fail (even with full JS). Despite my attempts to get past the front line support I've still not found anyone there who is able to understand why this would be a problem. This level of incompetence makes me wonder about the whole operation. It was actually the thing that made me switch to using http://traintimes.org.uk/ http://traintimes.org.uk/ permanently.

refrigerator 9y ago

Never heard of it, but looks pretty great. Have you tried the Trainline app? If so, how does this conpare? Cheers

ratherbefuddled 9y ago
Trainline is a fairly typical commercial website. It won't work without javascript and cookies enabled, it wants to track you, it doesn't follow accessibility guidelines and is over a megabyte and a half in size. If you access it on a mobile device it has the usual annoying ad for the pointless mobile app (complete with onerous Ts & Cs, overly grasping permissions and invasive privacy policy) covering a quarter of the screen with the tiny dismiss button. In short, everything that's wrong with web development these days and defensible only because it's one of many. By contrast traintimes.org.uk is simple, highly usable, small, accessible, respectful of privacy and works as plain html. For me it's an easy choice but your mileage may vary!
- dracos 9y ago
  Just to note, though, that you can book tickets with Trainline, which you can't with traintimes.org.uk, it does have limits :) However, Trainline charge a booking fee – https://ehelp.thetrainline.com/app/answers/popup_detail/a_id/2825/rdr/10 https://ehelp.thetrainline.com/app/answers/popup_detail/a_id... – and so I would suggest using any train operating company site (they all sell nearly all tickets), whichever one you find most agreeable.