Great Western Coffee Shop

Travelling in august during a week day (flexible on time). Recommendations on best priced ticket and or route  please.

Single, return? Railcards? Numbers?



Edit: Apropos of nothing, this was my 12000 post on this forum.

NRE gives:

1. dep 0957 arr 1701 (7hr04min) ^54.65 Adv SGL SNR, change RDG/BHI/LLJ

2. dep 1427 arr 1948 (5hr21min) ^115.65 SGL SNR, change VXH/LUL/EUS/LLJ

Lots of different fares because of peaks. Given the choice, I'm not sure I'd come back.

OTC

Sample calculation for 12th August. Using Chiltern Advance tickets ... I entered "via Codsall"

Egham to London - 6.00
Bus to Marylebone - 1.50
London Marylebone to Chester - advanced fare on 11:50 train  - 21.10 (same fare on some other trains too)
Chester to Betwys-y-coed single - 5.30

Total ^33.90 single - that's with senior railcard

Not sure why you would travel via Marylebone?
Advance fare from Euston to Chester on the 12th August is ^10.55 on certain trains with a senior card

In which case I'm not sure either  :-\

I did a quick lookup with a Chester split knowing from somewhere it's a competitive route, but stopped short of checking both competitors.  Thanks for your help with a better deal ...

1 way, no railcards, 1 person.

cheers

Advance fare, look at Chester split as suggested above.

Therefore I believe the cheapest (though someone tell me if this is incorrect) fare based on Grahams example of 12th August (Advance fares can fluctuate daily so without knowing the exact date we can't give you an exact price) would be:
Egham to Waterloo ^9.10

Waterloo to Euston ^1.50 via bus if using Oyster/Contactless Card OR
Waterloo to Euston ^2.30 via tube if using Oyster/Contactless Card OR
Waterloo to Euston ^4.80 via tube cash single
(Or if you're feeling very energetic walk)

Euston (13:10) to Chester (15:13) ^20.00 OR
Euston (12:40) change at Crewe, arrives Chester (14:46) ^16.00

Chester (15:25) to BYC (17:01) ^8.00

Interesting when I see a question like this I keep "worrying" it.

For the randomly selected date, I also called up advance fares Egham to Chester as a 'check':
* 09:27 Egham -> 13:13 Chester - ^17.00
* 10:06 Egham -> 13:46 Chester - ^17.00
* 10:36 Egham -> 14:13 Chester - ^23.00

Cheapest Advance Egham -> Betws-y-Coed is ^47.00  (11:27 Egham to 17:01 BYC) but you can do it for just ^25 by taking a more leisurely train a bit earlier - still get to BYC at the same time.

I too do exactly the same.

I hadn't thought of looking Egham to Chester, welcome to our wonderfully complex ticket system we have. Complex if you want to save money at least.

As always thanks for the advice. Booked Egham to chester for ^23 and chester to betws-y-coed for ^8 so a total of ^31.