Time to plan some away day trips out of London, as Greater Anglia is offering return train fares from £10 for the next few weeks.
The new ‘Hare Fares’ offer passengers off-peak returns across the Greater Anglia network with three zones and three simple return prices: £10, £15 and £20, with children travelling for just £2 return each. There is no limit on the number of tickets, but they must be booked before 30th October for travel between 12th October and 2nd December.
Example train fares from London:
Destinations for £10 per person
- Cambridge
- Chelmsford
- Southend
Destinations for £15 per person
- Braintree
- Colchester
- Clacton-on-Sea
Destinations for £20 per person
- Felixstowe
- Ipswich
Hare Fares are available as standard off-peak advance tickets only and can only be booked online exclusively from here.
Martin Moran, Greater Anglia’s Commercial, Customer Services and Train Presentation Director, said: “Our region has so much to offer and whether it’s a trip to the city or coast, shopping or sightseeing, we’re giving people more money to spend on having a great time by helping them save money on their train fare.”
Hare Fares are not valid on journeys wholly within the Oyster card area zones 1-6, nor on Stansted Express services. Standard advance refund rules apply, and you can’t break the journey along the route.
A further money-saving tip — when searching for journeys, most people put “London (any)” in the search box. Once you find a trip you like, look for the next station the train stops at, and if you can catch the train there AND avoid travelling into London Zone 1, you can reduce your travel card cost as well.
For example, trips that start at Liverpool Street will cost the same if you catch the train at Stratford, but you could avoid paying for the TfL zone 1 fare to get to Liverpool Street to start the journey.
Just to clarify, these are off peak day returns, not Advance tickets, so they are valid on any off peak train that day. But as noted, break of journey is not permitted.
Can you use your Network Card?
No railcards. So pretty much all of them work out more expensive for me than 2 x Advance + railcard.
Yep no railcards, not even the Greater Anglia Club 50, which often is a better deal on GA routes than Network Card as there is no minimum fare. (Tested on the website).
Norwich zone (£20) includes trains up to Sheringham at the same price (which is commonly the case), and Sudbury (SUY) is also in the promo (LST-SUY is usually expensive, usually not available as an Advance, to protect “commuter” revenues GA doesn’t offer Advances on the stopping trains on the GEML)
This year’s scheme is nowhere near as generous as previous years, and after some years of cheap fares on GA it is now back to the levels where if you have access to a car it will cost less in fuel to drive than take the train in many cases (even longer distances like London to North Norfolk coast)
There is a legal “hack” that you can do if you need a break in journey; if the break is close to your final destination then book the ticket to the final destination on the Hare Fare and then a “local” day return in the reverse direction; to be legal you have to actually travel the complete distance. (This is a hack reduce cost of travel to GEML stopping service stations and some branches like to SUY as well–for SUY it is almost always a bit cheaper to “beyond and back” to COL). Booking a hare fare to the break station and then a second ticket onwards might work if the break station is close to start or end of main journey. Other kinds of overlapping multi-ticket hack to create a break are unlikely to be legal (standard “splits” of course are legal even with hare fare)
And for a multi-day trip you may find the Hare Fare is cheaper than a single, book one in each direction and don’t bother to make the return (airlines try and track people doing similar ticks but
For Southend, c2c booked 3 days ahead is a little more initially but railcards are valid so that’s an alternative on that journey.
Just a shame the return journey has to be checked if travelling late thanks to possible diversions via Stratford and earlier last trains on those days
Like Chris O … there’s also the saving if you are a geriatric & have a Zones pass:
“Boundary Zone6 to $Destination + Railcard” gives considerable savings.
What a shame the tickets to Norwich are double what they were last year!! I was looking forward to a day in Norwich for shopping, sightseeing and lunch. £10 I can afford, unfortunately £20 I cannot. Surely, it is better to have a small profit on a full train than no profit on an empty one!!! Never mind, maybe I will be able to afford it next year!!