BeenThere-DoneThat		The Unofficial Guide to Great Britain

If you would like to tour Britain, or travel within a much smaller area such as a county, and you either can't or don't want to drive then your only other option is public transport. So what are your options? You can choose from trains (long and short distances), coaches (long distances), buses (short distances) or taxis. You could also choose domestic flights within Great Britain. They all have their own advantages and disadvantages and can obviously be used in combination.

There is a Transport Journey Planner which covers plane, train, coach and bus journeys both separately and in combination and will compare with the equivalent car journey (Door to door planner) or if you want just train timetables and fares you want National Rail Enquiries

NOTE: All the prices quoted below are current for 2005 and are quoted in £ (Pounds Sterling).

If you want to stay in a central location and visit surrounging places then you could not do better than to aquire a Bus Routes Map. Most county councils provide these as either printed paper, PDF format for viewing on the Internet or both. These maps generally also include rail routes and stations where they exist. The printed maps are usually provided free and the routes are generally differentiated by availability e.g. those routes where buses are available almost every day and routes where buses are less frequent.

These Bus Routes Maps enable you to see at a glance what routes exist and the towns and villages through which they pass. This will enable you to choose a centre in which to stay which gives you best access to the places which you may want to visit.

This is an example of a PDF format Bus Route Map covering the county of Hampshire for which you will need an appropriate reader. Remember that you can zoom in to these maps for greater detail.

In most cases these maps show routes which cross county boundaries and in the example above you can see routes from Winchester in Hampshire to Salisbury in Wiltshire. You may need maps for more than one county to cover the area that you wish to explore.

Once that you have decided which routes you may want to use then you should obtain timetables for those routes. You can probably find these on the Internet or you can buy them in printed form.

Read this American lady's account of using local buses in Dorset. This link is repeated below in the 'Using Local Buses' section.

Trains are fast but relatively expensive and there is a reasonably extensive network covering the whole country.

Routes

There is a map of all the railway routes covering England, Wales and Scotland. This is provided in Adobe Acrobat PDF format so you will need to have a version of Acroread to use in conjunction with your web browser. The map can be zoomed at any point to enlarge the detail to the point at which it is legible and would be a very useful tool whilst planning journeys around the country. It does have the disadvantage, if you have a modem connection to the Internet, of being about 2MB large. This will take about 7 minutes to download with a 56k modem and correspondingly longer with a slower modem. Some sections of the map, when clicked, take you to yet other maps although not anywhere near as large (140 - 240k).

Fares and tickets

There are various types of tickets available, and different fares, for any given journey. Let us take, as an example, a day return journey from London Paddington to Bath - a distance of approximately 100 miles. If you were to walk up to the booking office on the day you were going to travel and ask for a return to Bath you would be asked to pay £93.00 (a 'Standard' return) or £46.50 for a single. If you are prepared to accept some travel restrictions such as not travelling during peak periods then the cost would have been only £43.00 (A 'Saver' return). If you were to have booked your journey in advance you might have paid just £35.00 (a 'SuperSaver' return) although the availability of these tickets may be limited and are not available for all routes. It pays to study ticket types!

Types of ticket - Overseas visitors should read the section about touring tickets entitled 'Visitors to Britain' near the bottom of the 'Types of Ticket' page. There are also touring tickets generally available, including for residents of this country, where a fixed sum is paid to cover unlimited travel for 7 or 14 days - see under 'Special tickets' in the above link.

Timetables, fares and ticket purchase on-line   **

For bargain price fares from London to other cities have a look at Megabus/Megatrain

I shall use the same example journey, London to Bath, as mentioned above in the rail section although in this instance the coach leaves from Victoria Coach Station. The advantage of travelling by coach, compared with travelling by train, is that it is considerably cheaper. The standard day return for this journey is £16.00 and a period return would be £22.00. The main disadvantage is that the journey time, one way, is 3 hours 15 minutes compared with 1 hour 30 minutes on the train and you probably do need to book in advance as the number of seats in a coach is a lot less than is available on a train. The single fare to Bath is £15.00.

You could have a day trip from London to somewhere such as Bath in the summer when there is more than 12 hours of daylight but you would have to start early and return late. The total travelling time would be in the order of 6 hours 30 minutes which could leave you with about 6 hours in Bath. If you intend staying in your planned destination for a number of days then the travelling time is less of a problem and you could save a lot of money.

You can also use the Journey Planner mentioned at the top of this page for planning coach journeys or combined bus/coach/rail trips.

Timetables, fares and ticket purchase on-line  *

For bargain price fares from London to other cities have a look at Megabus/Megatrain

Local bus service information is more fragmented on the Internet than for national services.

On each of the county pages, on this site, there are links to local Tourist Information Centres and local public transport sites where these are provided by the local authority.

Web site information for local transport, provided by local authorities, varies from very good to non-existant. Contact details for Tourist Information Centres are usually provided and these centres will send bus timetables by post for a small charge (sometimes free).

This site does a good job in providing local bus services information for the U.K. and Scenic Britain by bus has useful information on travelling by bus in Great Britain including some good links to other sites for further information.

You can also use the Journey Planner mentioned at the top of this page for planning bus journeys or combined bus/coach/rail trips. See the 'Touring from a central location' section above for information on Bus Routes Maps.

Read this American lady's account of using local buses in Dorset.

Taxi services are available in the majority of places in Britain. It is a good idea to carry a short list of telephone numbers of local taxi services with you if you use the buses so that in the event of the last bus failing to turn up, for whatever reason, you can at least telephone for a taxi to take you back to your accommodation.

Taxis serving all railway stations in Great Britain

Info Transport - transport guide for the U.K (Air, Train, Coach, Bus and Tram)

If you think that I should add something to this section do please let me know!   email me

You can also ask transport related questions, or relate your own transport experiences on the forum.

Public Transport		Great Britain