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Southeastern: Train tickets 4+

No booking fees‪‬, the go-ahead group plc.

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Travel anywhere: buy train tickets to and from any UK railway station, getting you where you need to go. eTickets and Key Smartcard tickets: offer more sustainable alternatives to paper tickets. Common Journeys: personalise your home screen and receive real-time updates on journeys you regularly make. One Click Delay Repay: making delays easier! We’ll automatically generate a delay replay claim and tell you about the compensation you’re entitled to if your train is delayed by 15 minutes or more. Journey alerts: get real-time notifications for journeys you are about to make straight to your phone. Digital Railcards: save money with the convenience of a Digital Railcard on your phone. Check how busy your train will be with SeatFinder information. Powered by data from Southeastern, National Rail Enquiries and Transport for London. Built with accessibility in mind: the user-friendly interface helps those with accessibility needs, and makes booking travel assistance easy.

Version 2.2.6

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Convenient, fast, easy.

It is convenient to buy tickets via the app - it is easy to search and to select this right tickets. It is fast - the app responds quickly. I’ve been using the app for a month and am glad I downloaded it. I high recommend it.

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Southeastern unveils accessibility improvements to app and online journey planner

Southeastern has launched a series of upgrades to its app and online journey planner to make it easier for customers to plan accessible journeys.

As one of the country’s biggest and busiest rail operators, providing more than 1,700 services and up to half a million journeys every weekday, Southeastern is committed to making travelling by train easy for everyone.

This includes supporting customers who require additional support when travelling across the network.

The new features include a Passenger Assistance booking tool, which is integrated with the journey planner, and can be used to request help with getting on and off the train and navigating through stations. Bookings can be made on our app and online up to two hours before departure.

A new Step Free Journey Planner also allows customers to plan their journey by using only step-free stations and interchanges.

Tina Owusu, Southeastern’s Head of Inclusive Customer Experience, said: “We know travelling by train can be daunting to some customers, particularly if they have accessibility requirements. These improvements will make sure the railway is open and accessible to all and is part of our wider plans to build a better, more reliable and sustainable railway.

“We hope these upgrades will make it easier for customers across south-east London, Kent and East Sussex to travel with us and we look forward to welcoming more customers onboard in the future.”

A recent independent survey of customers across the country who had used Passenger Assistance found Southeastern was the best in the industry across several areas, including how well your needs were understood (82%), staff being knowledgeable (82%), receiving the expected assistance (87%) and overall satisfaction (98%).

Accessibility Consultant and Paralympian Andy Barrow added: “As an end-user as well as a consultant, I have always found the Southeastern app quick and easy to use when I choose to book assistance ahead of a journey.

“The recent addition of the Step Free Journey Planner means I have instant access to detailed station information within the app and peace of mind that I’ll be able to complete my journey, even if I’m unfamiliar with the station that I’m travelling to.

“Disabled people have busy lives, so having readily available information to enable them to quickly determine the level of assistance they require for any given journey is an important step.”

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Wilmington-Raleigh passenger rail study draft recommends routing through Goldsboro

W ILMINGTON, N.C. (WECT) - A commissioned passenger rail study has recommended the proposed Wilmington to Raleigh passenger train service should take a route that goes through Goldsboro instead of Fayetteville.

Annual ridership from Wilmington is expected to be 80,000 riders annually, with three trains projected each day in both directions, according to the study. WGI Inc. engineering firm of West Palm Beach cited several reasons in the April draft of the Southeastern North Carolina Passenger Rail Feasibility Study, including lower construction and maintenance costs.

Steve Unger, president of the non-profit Eastern Carolina Rail, says the service would expand public transportation between the cities. Right now, the only option is by bus.

“This would provide public transportation at a reasonable price and at a very good speed for folks in both Raleigh and Wilmington,” Unger said.

The study states that travel time between Wilmington and Raleigh would be about two hours and 35 minutes as opposed to an additional hour through Fayetteville.

A second rail line connecting Wilmington and the State Port would also be needed to the outside world for freight use. Currently, only a lone track via Lumberton services Wilmington.

The cost for the entire project, including rebuilding the track from Castle Hayne to Wallace, would cost $810 million rather than the $980 million for the Fayetteville route.

“This is excellent and exciting news,” said Gene Merritt of Eastern Carolina Rail, a non-profit advocacy group dedicated to returning passenger service to the Port City. “This report shows we are finally on our way.”

Preliminary Federal grants of $500,000 have been awarded for the Wilmington to Raleigh and Wilmington to State Port projects, as well as five other passenger rail projects in North Carolina. Future steps that require planning and eventual construction will require a mix of federal and state funding.

Jason Orthner is the rail division director at NCDOT and says there are several benefits to having this rail service in place.

“The train is a great way for them to access communities without the need of a vehicle, and they can remain productive either doing work or having meetings on the train,” Orthner said.

“Some of the funding will be used to upgrade tracks so trains can run at speeds up to 79 mph and re-establish passenger rail depot locations along the way. One local project underway is a fund-raising venture to save the historic Union Station in Goldsboro, not used for trains since 1968,” an Eastern Carolina Rail press release states.

“The report calls for passenger stops in Raleigh (Union Station), Clayton, Selma (at the existing Amtrak station), Goldsboro and Wilmington with two other additional sites to be chosen.

After a comment period for stakeholders this spring, a final feasibility study would lead to a Service Development Plan. Requiring a 10 percent state match to 90 percent federal funding, according to the draft report, ‘a Service Development Plan is a high-level business, operating, and capital plan with the objectives of demonstrating operational and financial feasibility.’”

Unger says it will take the public’s support to keep this project moving.

“The harder we work to bring it here, the greater chance we have of having it come here as soon as we possibly can,” Unger said.

Maps Show Passenger Trains in US vs. Europe?

The maps purported to show a major difference in density between the two systems., anna rascouët-paz, published april 27, 2024.

On April 15, 2024, a Facebook page titled The sound of Train posted an image of two maps purporting to compare passenger train lines in the United States and Europe ( archived ):

The post had gained 117,000 reactions, 21,800 comments and 44,000 reshares as of this writing. The same image appeared on Reddit in 2023, and also went viral. "In Germany, trains are used even for [sic] go from bathroom to kitchen," one user quipped.

Although the maps conveyed a generally accurate impression of the differences in size and density between the U.S. passenger train system and Europe's, the U.S. map did not include all regional and commuter passenger train lines, so the comparison was slightly unbalanced. The European map was an accurate representation of reality.

It is true that, compared to Europe, the U.S.'s passenger train system is underdeveloped. More accurately, it has been severely degraded over the decades, as many lines across the country have fallen into disuse since the 1960s, according to a 2019 post by The Greater Greater Washington (a website that advocates for better urbanization in the Washington, D.C., area) based on data from the National Association of Rail Passengers .

In the same period, Europe opened many new passenger train lines at the city and regional level, connecting large cities within countries and even across borders. In 1981 , the French government opened Europe's first high-speed train line between Paris and Lyon. That technology expanded across the continent with AVE , connecting major cities in Spain, and the Eurostar , which connects London to Paris, Brussels and Amsterdam. As of 2024, trains of all speeds connected Munich to Prague, Marseille to Barcelona, and Vienna to Rome.

The U.S. map in the image accurately shows Amtrak's map of trains, which we found on  Amtrak's website . Amtrak is a national network of trains that connect cities over long distances.

Meanwhile, we compared the viral European map to national railroad maps and realized that it includes not only long-distance lines, but also regional ones. In part, that is why that map has considerably more lines compared to the U.S.'s.

In other words, a fair comparison between the two systems would include all regional U.S. lines such as the Long Island Rail Road and Metro-North (the nation's largest networks with a combined 136 million rides each year); the NJ Transit Rail Operations , which links New York City to Philadelphia, and the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority — better known as  SEPTA — around Philadelphia. Other such lines include Caltrain around San Francisco and Denver's  RTD .

Even when it was most used in the 1910s and 1920s , America's passenger train network  displayed stark differences  between regions. Eastern cities are closer, denser, and more amenable to railroad connection, while, in the west, agglomerations are more distant from each other. Still, travelers used the train widely a century ago . 

All of this changed starting in 1929 due to multiple reasons: First, the Wall Street crash of 1929 sparked the Great Depression, which made mid-and long-distance travel less affordable to people with economic problems. At the same time, Ford Motor Company brought the mass production of cars to the market, and, by that year, 23 million automobiles were on the road for a population of 123 million people. The subsequent urbanization changed the transportation market, making it more convenient for households to own one or more cars. Then came airplane travel. Little by little, the U.S. economy deprioritized the train system.

But the success of local and regional train lines in the northeast of the U.S. might provide a clue to the evolving transportation needs of the country. Experts say creating pedestrian-friendly streets and roads and investing in public transportation helps  decongest cities and highways. U.S. President Joe Biden announced in late 2023 a plan to develop new train lines and technology, including high-speed rail for passengers. 

Meanwhile, in Europe, low-cost airlines have upended the train market. While many passengers would   rather travel by rail , the costs of train tickets are often higher  compared to widely accessible plane tickets. There, too, European politicians are  seeking solutions to make train travel more attractive than air travel to most passengers. 

A Complete History of Trains in the United States | U.S. Train Guide . https://www.volocars.com/blog/complete-history-of-trains. Accessed 24 Apr. 2024.

Alpert, TransitHistoryBy David, et al. The Evolution of Amtrak, 1971-2011 . https://ggwash.org/view/9187/the-evolution-of-amtrak-1971-2011. Accessed 24 Apr. 2024.

Amtrak . https://www.amtrak.com/content/dam/projects/dotcom/english/public/documents/Maps/Amtrak-System-Map-1018.pdf. Accessed 24 Apr. 2024.

Can Europe's Trains Compete with Low-Cost Airlines? https://www.ft.com/content/b5591361-7e10-4926-ae90-851fb5c1520d. Accessed 24 Apr. 2024.

Henry Ford: Technology and Innovation in the 1920s | College Reading and Writing . https://courses.lumenlearning.com/suny-esc-introtocollegereadingandwriting/chapter/henry-ford-technology-and-innovation-in-the-1920s/. Accessed 24 Apr. 2024.

House, The White. 'FACT SHEET: President Biden Announces Billions to Deliver World-Class High-Speed Rail and Launch New Passenger Rail Corridors Across the Country'. The White House , 8 Dec. 2023, https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2023/12/08/fact-sheet-president-biden-announces-billions-to-deliver-world-class-high-speed-rail-and-launch-new-passenger-rail-corridors-across-the-country/.

Lew, Alexander. 'Today in History: Train à Grande Vitesse (TGV) Delivers First Passengers to Lyon'. Wired . www.wired.com , https://www.wired.com/2007/09/today-in-hist-3/. Accessed 24 Apr. 2024.

'Mapa alta velocidad España 2024 (AVE, Avlo, Ouigo, iryo)'. ENTERAT.COM , https://www.enterat.com/servicios/mapa-ave-espana.php. Accessed 24 Apr. 2024.

'Routemap'. Eurostar , https://www.eurostar.com/rw-en/destinations/routemap. Accessed 24 Apr. 2024.

Stock Market Crash of 1929 | Federal Reserve History . https://www.federalreservehistory.org/essays/stock-market-crash-of-1929. Accessed 24 Apr. 2024.

APTAAdmin. 'Benefits of High-Speed Rail for the United States'. American Public Transportation Association , https://www.apta.com/research-technical-resources/high-speed-passenger-rail/benefits-of-high-speed-rail-for-the-united-states/. Accessed 25 Apr. 2024.

Morar, Tudor, and Luca Bertolini. 'Planning for Pedestrians: A Way Out of Traffic Congestion'. Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences , vol. 81, June 2013, pp. 600–08. ScienceDirect , https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sbspro.2013.06.483.

Why Train Travel Is Good for the Environment . https://www.greenguides.net/post/trains-reduce-carbon-footprint. Accessed 25 Apr. 2024.

By Anna Rascouët-Paz

Anna Rascouët-Paz is based in Brooklyn, fluent in numerous languages and specializes in science and economic topics.

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What is Labour’s plan for rail travel and will it make tickets cheaper?

Party wants to fully nationalise train network within five years of coming to power, in ‘biggest rail reform for a generation’

Labour has made one of its most radical proposals yet in the run-up to an election campaign: to fully nationalise the train network within five years of coming to power.

The party has pledged to guarantee the cheapest fares as part of “the biggest reform of our railways for a generation”, bringing all passenger rail into national ownership under the Great British Railways (GBR) body.

So, how difficult would the plan be to enact and what does it mean for passengers?

How would Labour’s plan for Great British Railways change the way the trains are run?

The headline change is nationalisation: the ambition that all passenger train operations, at least, should return to public ownership. But the wider aim is that control of trains and tracks – “wheels and steel”, as some put it – is brought back under one unified structure, at arm’s length from the government.

The actual railway infrastructure is already managed by the state-owned Network Rail, since the disastrous tenure of Railtrack in the early days of privatisation, and train operations in Scotland, Wales and a large chunk of England are in public ownership. So a fully renationalised railway (bar the rolling stock and freight) is not as big a step as it may once have sounded – and arguably the pragmatic extension of the plans drawn up by the Conservatives in 2021, to end the fragmentation and waste in the system.

How long will the changes take?

Labour said it would get the ball rolling on day one. Given the years it has taken for the Conservatives’ GBR plans to crystallise into a draft bill that has scant chance of passing before an election, supporters of the changes would be forgiven for not holding their breath for legislation. But some of the spadework has been done by the GBR transition team, and Labour will be hoping for a more stable tenancy in Downing Street to see the policy through. It is, it stresses, a long-term plan.

As far as nationalisation of the train operators goes, most of the contracts of remaining operators will expire naturally within the next term, while the government can exercise break clauses in others, such as Avanti West Coast and Cross Country.

What would the trains look like?

Eventually, they would all be GBR-branded trains rather than the individual liveries and logos of different operators. Labour hopes that this will make things simpler for passengers, avoiding confusion over ticketing, as well as cutting costs.

Would it make train travel cheaper?

Possibly, but not for a while yet. Labour says it wants to make the railway more affordable but has definitively avoided any pledges to cut or even freeze the overall level of fares.

However, it believes that its plans will eventually save £2.2bn a year by avoiding the duplication and bureaucracy brought on by the current system, where the Department for Transport tightly controls and specifies contracts for the private firms, and reams of staff are employed in back-end roles. That could give ministers some scope to use more of the billions in annual taxpayer subsidy to bring fares down long-term.

What about this best-price guarantee?

Make that an “ambition”, according to the policy document . It’s testament to the complexity, or occasional absurdity, of UK rail fares that even after years of industry focus on improving the system, renationalising looks an easier promise than telling a passenger they’ve paid the right amount.

Things can be improved, Labour says, as contactless tap-in and tap-out payments extend through more and more of the country, opening up the possibility of a Transport for London-style system, where fares are streamlined and automatically capped or refunded.

The shadow transport secretary, Louise Haigh, pointedly chose the headquarters of Trainline in central London to launch her plans on Thursday, paying tribute to the travel app firm’s “relentless focus on passengers [and] improving their experience”. Trainline shares fell 10%, even though Labour says it has no plans to replace the private firm with a single state retailer.

But given that the app’s business depends on people paying extra to cut through the railway’s confusing fares, fragmentation and lack of a decent central ticketing site, Trainline shareholder nerves might be taken as a vote of confidence that GBR will improve the industry’s own offering.

How else might passengers benefit?

Labour says it would leave the running of the railway to the experts – but the transport secretary would set strategy and take on the role of passenger-in-chief, and the industry would not be “marking its own homework”.

The plan aims to strengthen the voice of passengers by rolling together the various bodies currently meant to be standing up for them – the watchdog Transport Focus and the little-known Rail Ombudsman, as well as a few divisions of the Office of Rail and Road.

What will happen to the private operators?

Their representatives at Rail Partners warn that it will be “messy” and the railway will lose their expertise. But the people actually running train operators, right up to the managing directors, have typically stayed in post with a different coloured badge when the owning groups moved on, and passengers at say, Southeastern or LNER may not feel life is very different. Firms once regarded as pillars of privatised rail such as Stagecoach, National Express (now Mobico) and Virgin have long exited UK rail already, pursuing business elsewhere.

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