Southern Trains: Cosham to London Victoria

Cheap Advance Tickets

I had heard rumours of Southern’s wonderfully cheap advance online tickets from the south coast to London Victoria from friends, and was greatly intrigued. So, when I wanted to go to London for a couple of days, instead of just booking a Megabus, I decided to check out the Southern Trains website.

The way the advance tickets work is that you enter your journey details, then view all the different available train times, and they tell you how much it will cost to get each train. Essentially you pay for a particular train, and that is the only journey your ticket is valid for. I found a reasonable variety of trains that were only £6, not just ones at ridiculous times as I had been expecting. The one I decided on in the end was the 8 42, arriving into Victoria at 10 46. I only paid £4 because I have a third off with my young person’s railcard (£26 for one year). I found another selection of £6 journeys available for my way back the next day and booked the 20 32, the last direct train to Cosham from Victoria.

For the advance tickets, you have to pay by credit card online. You then have two choices for getting the tickets: 1) have them sent to you by post for a charge of £6 per booking 2) collect them yourself from the self-service ticket machine at the station of your choice. I chose the second option. To collect the tickets, you need to have the reference number they email you, as well as the card you used to pay online. You select the ‘collect pre-paid tickets’ option on the screen, then put your card into the ticket machine (they don’t take any money from it), and then type in the reference number.

The total, for there and back on two different days, was £8 (price without young person’s railcard would be £12). As you are still using normal trains, your journey quality is not affected in any way. The disadvantage is of course the inconvenience of only being able to choose between certain trains when booking, and then being committed to catching that exact train once you have booked it. And there is of course the risk that you might miss your train and end up having to pay for another ticket. If you are prepared to accept these inconveniences however, this is a very good way of paying a lot less for exactly the same train service you would get if you paid the full price.