Even if you don’t do a lot of UK rail travel, take a look at this walkthough I’ve put together for thetrainline.com. It’s amazing how hard they’ve managed to make finding cheap tickets. You have to ignore the search results, click on a textual link, and then select your fare from a page containing - wait for it - up to 150 radio buttons in a huge table - with the tickets differentiated by weird codes like 1ST ADVANCE2 and STD ADVANCE4…
The mind boggles!
Note: the walkthrough may load slowly. It’s best watched in full-screen mode. Thanks to Peter Otto for showing me this tip.
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My Mum, who’s in her seventies, recently needed to travel from central England to Waterloo, just outside Brussels in Belgium. She managed to get a really cheap rail fare on the Eurostar, which included free travel to her final destination, but no thanks to the sales staff at our local train station. They would have had her spend four times the money she eventually paid.
The best advice she got was from another traveller who had made a similar journey before, and that was to phone Eurostar and deal with them directly.
I think a personal recommendation is always the best one, so thanks for your walk through and thanks to all the other folks who contribute to travel journals and share their experiences.