I took the train to York yesterday for a customer meeting. The timing wasn't locked down until quite late so I wasn't able to book my ticket until Saturday evening.
So I was probably naive to be shocked by the prices quoted for the journey.
However, I played around with the "single tickets" option to get the price as low as possible and managed to get a reasonable fare by taking a hit on the (peak) outbound and getting a great deal on an off-peak "any train" ticket for the return journey.
However, it was only when I picked up the tickets from the machine at King's Cross on Monday morning that I realised that my off-peak return ticket was actually with "Grand Central" rather than with National Express East Coast.
Now this could have been a big problem: they only run three trains a day in each direction so it drastically reduced my options. However, their 14:10 departure from York fitted with my plans so I wasn't too upset.
It proved to be a good mistake to have made... the journey was smooth, with no station stops at all and it arrived on time.
Nice to see competition on the railways in action!
