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Comment by CarolineW | Hacker News Reader

Blithering nonsense. You can buy an advance ticket for 33.50, saving time, money, and "carbon."

With a little work you get:

    £29.10
        SHF LGE 10:49 11:30  £7.00 Advance
        LGE EMD 11:30 11:34  £2.10 Anytime
        EMD SNF 11:43 14:18 £20.00 Advance

That's easy - the report is complete nonsense, or the individual is misguided at best, or he just wanted a day in Berlin and this was his excuse.

Not sure which of those options I think is most likely.

View on HN

Option 3 - this was a pure linkbait play for moneysavingexpert.com dreamed up in the marketing department for link acquisition/higher search rankings and PR from "trusted" media sites.

It's true that you can get a cheaper (but still very expensive by the standards of anywhere else) ticket by booking for the middle of the day and weeks on advance, but if you need to travel at short notice or for a fixture during the day, you can expect daylight robbery for standing room in someone's armpit in a vestibule for 90 minutes.

Regardless whether or not it works out in this case, from working traveling around Europe for the last 8 months and always hoping to use the train, I've found it is crazy how much cheaper flights are.

I just flew from Berlin to Brussels, these are €10 flights one-way. The cheapest train tickets I can see for this start at €89 (from DB). That's a 1h30 flight, or 7 hour train ride.

Yes and no. Factor in getting to the airport, having to be there some hours before your flight, the level of security screening, the unpleasantness of the space you get to sit in on the plane, the inability to work sensibly on a reasonable sized laptop, the spotty wifi, and then being landed miles away from the city centre, I've generally found that train travel compares reasonably well.

Yes, individual journeys need to be assessed on their merits, but once you consider factors other than the list price of the fare, the economics are often not so clear.

I imagine that for many people, having a detour via another European city would be a big plus, rather than a minus. Going to paris, even just to have coffee, when they're leaving London for the weekend would appeal to many people I imagine.

Besides, it's amazing how expensive railways are even if they are slightly more expensive. We're talking 500+ km travel vs 100 km. One would expect a large difference.

> having to be there some hours before your flight, the level of security screening

for inner-european flights those aren't big issues. security is basically walking through a metal detector and you don't really have to wait for hours either.

wifi can be an issue though.

Good luck making that connection at Long Eaton

It's the same train - split tickets.

Your kung fu is better than the kid in the article. How did discover that splitting the trip was cheaper?

Look up the journey from SHF to SNF, look at all the stations the trains call at, download the fares splitting at each station, add the fares. It's about 10 minutes to do by hand, if you did it a lot then you could easily script it.

You can get the train times and fares with a curl on the NRE web site, parse with regex (never do that, but in this case it's a trivial hack - fix it later with your favorite "proper" parser), then look at all the combinations. I imagine Dijkstra would be quick, but it's quick enough just to do a DFS through the combinations.

I hated this too, having lived near Sheffield and now live in London.

This was moronic.

Getting to Wakefield is usually cheaper, but still.

megabus.com

Sheffield to Victoria : £11. Victoria to Shenfield : £8.20. (Probably cheaper)

So £19.20

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