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Comment by mattlondon | Hacker News Reader

London-Edinburgh is only just faster by train. There is not much in it TBH. It is about the break even point I guess.

There are other benefits like you can use your phone and get up and walk around more easily. If you go first class you can actually get some work done at tables and stuff. But the flip side is train travel is often 10 or 20 times more expensive than flying, so only worth doing if you can expense it IMO (or you get some huge off-peak super saver special one-time discount or whatever)

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In cases where trains and planes are equally fast, trains basically always win on comfort. Much easier boarding, better legroom, longer time of being able to sit down and focus on your work, and so on.

But the flip side is train travel is often 10 or 20 times more expensive than flying, so only worth doing if you can expense it IMO (or you get some huge off-peak super saver special one-time discount or whatever)

The standard off-peak walk-up fare (i.e. the maximum you will ever pay) between London-Edinburgh is £82, and the peak-time fare is £176. Cheaper if you book a couple of weeks in advance.

It can cost less than this to fly sometimes, but in practice not by that much unless you’re doing awkwardly-timed no-baggage Ryanair flights from Stanstead or whatever.

I have done that trip hundreds of times over the years and I think I’ve only ever flown when engineering works made it in feasible to take the train. Usually it’s no competition.

Where are you getting those fares?!

London Edinburgh flight with Ryanair is £14 (fourteen) for tomorrow. On train it is £197 for tomorrow.

Yes – if you're willing to fly from Stansted at 7:20am with no luggage, like I said above, you may be able to take a £14 Ryanair flight – though I doubt you can book this for tomorrow. If you can make these work, they're the cases where it's more cost-effective to fly.

A £197 train ticket is a walk-up, peak-time fare from Euston, which will take you via Birmingham. Not the way you'd to want to travel to Edinburgh – go off-peak up the East coast, and the walk-up fare is £82.

One of the good things about the UK rail ticketing system is that—while complex—all ticketing information is publicly available. You can look up the available fares between any pair of stations using the BR Fares site – e.g. https://www.brfares.com/!fares?orig=KGX&dest=EDB

Have they started selling oxygen separately from the main ticket yet?

As someone who has made this trip countless times, London-Edinburgh is sluggish. The UK's only true high-speed network is the Eurostar from London ('HS1'), under the channel.

Paris-Marseilles in 3.5 hours is a better comparator.

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