Great Western Coffee Shop

Good news for those who want a quick and easy way of buying cheap tickets, London Midland are switching from the awful "Trainline" style of ticket buying, to the "Mixing Deck" (a la NXEC).

You can see all available fares (including those "locked out") and all availiable trains. Either select the train, and mix and match fares, or select the fare and mix and match services. This makes it easy to tweak your journey times to see if a fare is cheaper.

And all this can be done without re-loading the page. (unlike on the train line)

Also see the Cheapest Fare finder, to help to find the lowest Advance fares.

I expect that most other operators will abandon the "Trainline" in the future. (perhaps even the trainline itself!)

Happy saving.... ;D

All Govia franchises are now using the Mixing Deck. Southern and South Eastern implemented it late February.

I was using the Southern website to book tickets when NXEC stopped accepting Amex. Now that NXEC accept Amex again I can use any of the sites.

Thetrainline may have been decent in the 90's, but its stagnation shows what a lack of competition can do.

Welcome to the FGW Coffee Shop forum, BringBackGNER.

NXEA also switched from trainline recently - surprised it took so long !

I think the "Mixing Deck" is a mixed blessing (excuse the accidental pun)  :-[

For those of us who are a bit canny and know what you need to do to try and find the cheaper fares it's brilliant. However, I think that a first time or occasional user who didn't know what they were doing could have some real problems with it.

I'm a total convert now, but I had to do quite a bit of thinking the first time I used it before I could figure out exactly what was going on.

But the old system is worse! Inexperienced users might not realise that cheaper fares are available, (by changing the times, for example) as locked fares are not shown.

One complaint - how do you get group-save discounts on the Mixing Deck?

I dislike the mixing deck system, am used to using thetrainlines system on fgw. Also knowing how to manipulate it for the best fares. I also find it's slower to load, the nxec website is hopelessly slow!

(apologies if I reported a post btw, it's difficult to click on small buttons on a 3" screen!)

>:(

But with the FGW version, you have to re-load the page to find the fares for other times. This makes it slower.