You can also order tickets in advance from https://www.thetrainline.com/ and pick them up at the first ticket machine you come to after your plane lands. At MAN, that will be just as you enter the airport rail station. At GLA, you'd probably take the bus to the city center (https://www.glasgowairport.com/to-and-from/bus/), so you wouldn't pass an automatic ticket machine and pick up your rail tickets until you were ready to depart on your first rail journey.
I just checked the first of my rail journeys for the next trip, Manchester Airport to Skipton. The ticket price is the same whether it's purchased from Transpennine Express or from Trainline. The latter charges a £1.02 booking fee for a £34.10 ticket. If you're traveling around enough to use several rail companies and you order tickets in advance from those companies, can you pick up all of your tickets from the same machine? I like to have all of them in hand at the start of my holiday, and I avoid having them on my phone. The rail companies won't mail outside the UK, and lately Trainline doesn't, either.
All of my rail journeys for the upcoming trip are on TransPennine Express and Northern Rail, so I'm researching National Express coach routes to avoid those rail lines. Neither line has any customer service to speak of (except to swear at), so if I decide to risk traveling by rail, I'll buy through Traveline because their web site is navigable, unlike either of the rail lines, and they accept PayPal, so I can avoid giving my credit card info to companies that I don't trust.
Does everyone have their electricity back now? I hope anyone who is dependent on it, for example to power their oxygen supply, has a backup source of electricity. On a personal level, I'm glad I wasn't on a train or, even worse, on the Tube!
Apparently there were too many cancelled trains to make it practical to lay on buses as substitute transport? When it's only a dozen or so trains, it doesn't usually take more than half an hour to bring in a sufficient number of buses. At least that was my experience the first time I traveled from London to Nuneaton. After the train stopped in Milton Keynes it couldn't continue because of an engine on fire just beyond the station. The train I was on was the last one that passengers were able to leave, because it had been able to pull forward far enough to align the front carriage with the very end of the platform. The passengers on the trains stopped behind mine were stuck in their carriages until the track could be cleared and their trains could move up to the platform.
It's a difficult one, I have recently returned from Norway which wants to be the first cashless society in the world. Some of the shops don't even accept cash but the older folks seemed to embrace it there. I do get the issue about worries about fraud and lack of understanding of technology, but I have seen cases first hand where older people have been directly targeted in burglaries as they are often keeping large sums of cash at home.
My reply was in 2019 — nearly a lifetime ago in terms of the rapidity of change.Sadly not for long the Barclays Bank in Holmfirth is on the list of closures announced today . It appears the only bank now left is Wainwrights owned by Auntie so good luck with that . It has a cash machine but you put your card in , tap £30 you are issued with £15 and a voucher to the value of £15 which can be used in store in exchange for goods ............... or used with additional cash to purchase any items , I think we know which option you'll be encouraged to use.
Not sure if it's the same in the US, but I've noticed a significant shift away from cash since Covid. You're right in the past it was generally frowned upon to make small purchases with cards, that's not the case anymore. From what I can recall from my trip last year to Holmfirth, I think I used my card or mobile phone via Apple Pay for every single purchase. Even small independents on market stalls all accept card payments now. I know many rue the move away from cash, personally I find it much safer, convenient and I no longer build up lots of annoying small change !
Good point Barry re the small change, though saying that, it was great to go through all you pockets and find you had more money than you thought you had. Its is all a move to get us onto digital currency, though I was unaware that for many years, every note we spend is tracked by the serial number, they know you had it and when you give it to someone else, when they spend it, they know who you gave it to when they spend it or put it in the bank
