To book a train journey is bloomin' hard work

[Onebananatwo]

I'm trying to book a train journey to London.

The first website I used took me nowhere near where I wanted to end up and said that I had to use bus, train and walk to finish journey off.

The second website I used took me closer but at useless hours.

The third website I used, took me to where the second website took me, but wants me to remortgage the house to purchase the tickets.

Using a combination of the 3 websites, and a fourth, I've been able to get the tickets. This has taken me an hour and 45 minutes (longer than the actual train journey!) to work out how to get from A to B!

Yep I agree. My boss was trying to get from A - B the other day and it would have taken him four hours, I gave up trying to book tickets and told him to drive instead. He was there in an hour an half.

From Victoria get the tube, district and circle to South Ken - 2 stops no changes. Easy

Train websites are purposely tricky to use. They certainly don't advertise the fact that it's often much cheaper to book two single journeys rather than a return.

www.guardian.co.uk/money/2011/dec/30/cheap-train-tickets-fares

Some good tips, including the comments

YANBU. This is a key source of maritals in our house - we only ever travel to London and even so we have a massive fight about who has to book the tickets every single time. We both hate it. I maintain that I hate it more, so DH should do it. And I especially hate it, whereas he just hates it as much as he hates other buying ticket type tasks. He isn't really persuaded by this argument.

I have just had a look at National Rail website and it is as I suspected. Some Southampton-Victoria trains are a change at Clapham Junction, and others are a change at Woking then Clapham. I imagine that the particular time that the OP wanted to travel meant that there wasn't enough transfer time in CJ. It could take a good 5 - 10 minutes to transfer platforms, especially if the Southampton trains come in on a far platform. The Woking trains will be much closer to the Victoria ones, and only take 5 minutes to make the switch. Many Woking trains are express, only stopping in CJ, so that might be another reason for routing you that way.

What I would personally do is just book a ticket from Southampton to London Terminals, and get off the train in CJ and then chance your luck. There can't be more than five or ten minutes in it. If you can get a Travelcard in Southampton then that's the ticket to get.

My normal train is on the Waterloo line, and any time I have wanted to go to Victoria, I haven't had to wait much more than 5 minutes for a train once arriving at the correct platform.

The vast majority of Southampton trains go to Waterloo rather than Victoria. And CJ is a hugely unpleasant station to change at if you don't have to - even now there's a lift to each platform it's the busiest station in the country with some huge gaps between platform and train, so I suspect the routing guide tries to get people to change at Woking instead if there's a choice.

To get to South Ken you'd either get a single tube ticket or Oyster on arrival, or if you want it all on one ticket, you want a return to "Underground Zone 1" which allows you two tube journeys from your London terminus. But as South Ken is a tube station, complaining a rail site won't get you there easily is a bit like moaning a flights website won't get you to a bus stop.

Should it be helpful to you OP, there's trains 2-4x hourly from CJ to West Brompton and Kensington Olympia, which would get you to the District line for South Ken without having to go via Victoria tube which is hellishly crowded with loads of stairs.

BBC News must have been reading MN