So, I went outside London for a festival last week and I booked a train to Birmingham on London Midland. I reach the station at 10AM (thankfully) and what happens - the train is cancelled! There were no Virgin trains or anything running at that time and the next train was going only in like 3 hours! Flabbergasted and worried about missing my date, I had to use the enquiry service (I booked with nationalrail website in the first place) and they said they could not help me. So, I had to buy new tickets to go. :( Bottom line, next time -- I will probably use another train service provider.

Well National Rail Enquiries is in my opinion about the stupid crazy over charged National Rail service we get in the UK. What's the point - I might has well learn to drive now. I can't be bothered paying for this outragous service across the Uk anymore it's to expensive. You never get a seat you always standup and they charge top price fares just for a few miles I really hate it it's useless now and the delays the poor trains disgusting.

The train fairs have gone up to much in my opinion, they need to sort out the prices it's outrageous and you will get nasty services.... keep clear if you can stick with you're car instead that's if you have one but remember if you want to pay outrageous fairs make sure it's worth it.

This website provides details of train times in the UK.

You start off by entering your starting point and destination. The date is filled in automatically with today's date, but if you wish to enter another date, you had better make sure you use the right format as there is no date picker. If you want to make a return journey, you have to fill in the date for that as well, taking care to get the format exactly right. You also have to fill out the time, which is a bit annoying and would be better if it were populated automatically.

The next screen shows a summary of (sometimes) suitable journeys, which you can click through to see the full details, such as where you need to change trains. You need to check this with care, as if you are travelling late at night the site will think nothing of suggesting you wait on a station for five or six hours in the middle of the night for a connection. It is also not always up to date with the latest engineering works, all too common in the UK. You can have details of your chosen journey sent to your mobile phone, which is a useful service.

Best of all though is the feature which allows you to buy tickets for the journey you have chosen. The wonders of deregulation and privatisation mean you can buy your ticket from a bewildering range of companies, including some which operate trains at the other end of the country!

This site could be a lot more user-friendly with just a little work. Having said that, there is not a lot of competition out there - the only alternativea are one of the commercial website which sells tickets or the telephone.