Young Person's RailCard & advance purchase rail tickets

[lljkk]

Teen DD needs to make a trip to London in a few weeks. I am trying to figure out how to get the rail tickets at low price.

Will she get lowest price if she has a young person's rail card AND we buy advance purchase tickets? Or are advance purchase tickets not available with a rail card? Or maybe the further reduction (from advanced to advanced+rail card) is only negligible reduction, so not worth buying a rail card?

I am reading contradictory info online. Thanks in Advance.

Ah bummer. Looks like we can't get DD a rail card since she doesn't have passport or driving license. So simple advance purchase the only options. At least my query is answered.

The answer is that a 16-35 railcard does make even advance purchase tickets cheaper

This website suggest that, in person, you can use birth certificate to get it, not just licence or passport. Worth calling your local station to check if you can get one with that?
www.16-25railcard.co.uk/using-your-railcard/where-to-buy/

You can buy the card at a railway station with a birth certificate as evidence of age. The prices are cheapest with the card and the advance ticket. Go to national rail enquiries website and use the drop-down to select the Railcard when you do a ticket search and you will see the price. Do the same without and you'll know the cost difference and if it's worth buying the card. Easy!

@lljkk 25 not 35 sorry!

oh really, I only saw the screen shot list, nothing about birth certificates! Okay, that could be helpful. 3 children talking to me right now... Now headache of figuring out which trains, too.

Mega thanks.

(ps: I kept trying the enquiries site to figure this out, but short of creating a spreadsheet & matrix, I couldn't keep track of the prices for different services, different one way legs, etc., complicated since DD has to take different trains over 2 days). Thanks.

To add to the complications, it's also worth checking it "splitting" ticket is cheaper, ie, get two tickets for shorter legs of the journey rather than one ticket for the whole leg. For example, Cardiff to London is loads cheaper if you get one ticket to take you from Cardiff to Swindon and another to get you from Swindon to London. Same journey. Same train. Perfectly legit as long as whole journey is covered. Impossible to work out yourself - use a website like this www.splitticketing.com