Untangling the knotty web of great British transport (how to get on the love train if the system doesn't love you)

Synchronizing a car rental in Leeds with a train ride from London could put standardized math tests to shame. "If a train leaves Kings Court on 4/3/07 at 13:00, and arrives in Leeds at 9/3/07 at 15:32, what time can you rent a car?" It's a trick question: the rental agency is closed on Sundays, and 9/3/07 happens to be the Christian sabbath (that date is in the European format, of course). Let's backtrack on this crazy railroad.

My husband and I are booking our trip to London and Scotland. Our first three days will be spent in London, the details of which were carefully booked by some other sucker--er, nice person. I appreciate that nice person so much now that my husband and I  have almost killed each other three times while trying to independently book the remainder of our vacation. I hope that sharing our fumblings and bumblings might save you some time, and perhaps quiet your desire to kill.

We started innocently at the National Rail website, the online hub for train bookings throughout Great Britain. Our first revelation: National Rail doesn't run the train companies that crisscross the land. It simply collects all their schedules here, like an airline fare clearinghouse (say, Expedia). We targeted a fare we wanted, and decided to pay for it. But there was no payment button to click.

We called the National Rail directly, and were told to click through to the specific railroad company that's offering that fare, GNER. That site offers a 10% discount for booking online. Fantastic! We searched for the fare we'd just found on the National Rail site. It wasn't there.

We called GNER, were quoted a new, slightly higher fare at a different time than that we'd found on the National Rail site, and were told to book it online in order to save money. We shrugged and agreed.

First, the Kings Cross London station--the only station from which this particular fare leaves--didn't appear on the screen. There were two other Kings Cross options, but we were told over the phone that those were "not it." We needed to switch from the Safari browser to Firefox in order to reveal the right Kings Cross.

Next, we went through the online registration process. We gave our names and our moms' names and our dogs' names and our favorite colors--suffice to say that the process was long. We finished it. Then it told us that our postal code was not valid. After several attempts in different browsers, we called GNER again. "Is it possible that we can't pay for the fare online because we don't live in Britain?" we asked.

"That's right," said the operator. "You have to live in Britain to book online."

Funny, then, that the site has a pull-down menu for every nation in the world.

Ultimately, we booked our tickets over the phone: for approximately $240, both of us will ride from Kings Cross, London (the right one) to Leeds, and back. The 10% we might have saved by booking online became at least a 10% surcharge in the form of phone calls to Britain.

That said, the phone booking took place just in time to keep us from eviscerating each other, and the hospital charges we saved on that are surely a small fortune.