Title: An insider's guide to cheap rail tickets | Travel | The Guardian
Headings: An insider's guide to cheap tickets
Travel
An insider's guide to cheap tickets
Patrick Barkham
@patrick_barkham
Six journeys, six tricks
Tactics

Content: So if you buy a ticket from the capital to Edinburgh and travel only to Newcastle, you are fine as long as you are on the train. But once your journey is over, you could be stopped by an inspector at Newcastle and forced to pay the difference.) Less obvious are the regional discount cards. A Network Railcard costs £20 and gives 34% off journeys across a huge swath of south-eastern England, from London outwards to Hastings in the south, Exeter (via Waterloo only) in the south-west, Worcester in the west, Northampton in the north and King's Lynn and Harwich in the east. Anyone can buy the card, although on Mondays to Fridays you can only use it after 10am at most stations (earlier on some routes). There are similar, less extensive discount cards for parts of Scotland, the north-east and Cornwall and Devon (where a card costs £10), although with these you will have to prove that you live in the area. The most stylish and ridiculously brilliant fare-saving tactic, however, is this: do you travel around the country reasonably regularly after 10am but don't qualify for any discount cards? Wherever you live, march into your nearest station and demand a season ticket for the three-minute journey from Ryde St Johns Road to Ryde Esplanade on the Isle of Wight. This, the cheapest season ticket in the UK, will set you back £116.