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Hi,

I’m travelling from Glasgow to Paris to start my Interrail trip this week but I need some help with how an outbound journey is defined. I have the Global Flexi Pass with 7 travel days so am planning to use my outbound travel day for Edinburgh-London and then London-Paris via Eurostar on the same day. My question is whether I’m able to use this same travel day to travel from Glasgow-Edinburgh in the morning even though I’m not travelling to a border/port. Or would I have to just purchase the ticket full price?

Thank you :)

No problem to travel from Glasgow to Edinburgh and on to Paris as long as you do it all on the same day.

All trains that you board between 00.00 and 23.59 CE(S)T are the same travel day. So, your travel from home to London and then on to mainland Europe will be your outbound travel day. As long as you leave London before 23.00 GM(S)T.

You can board as many trains as you like on a travel day.

The In/out rules are simple:

At any time during your pass validity you can travel in your home country on any 2  travel days. You can use them for an unlimited number of trains in both your home country and any other pass country on a travel day. Breaks and use only in UK are both permitted

All journeys scheduled to leave between midnight and 2359 are valid, even if they arrive well into the next day. (But no changes after 2359)

You can use the 2 I/O days in any order and they do not have to be the same excursion, or even 1 in 1 out - they could be 2 in or 2 out. Just pay if you travel in the UK on any other day (eg flight and local train or bus)

As an example I have a 10 days in 2 months pass. I have 2 excursions planned. Excursion 1 is fly out from local airport and use 4 travel days on continent, then 1 In day from Brussels to home. (E* plus 2 UK trains. Second trip flights in and out and 5 days interrailing on continent.

As I now sit in some GB HTL and the BBC-news is in front of me: double check times a day or so advance-strikes and as I hear very reduced service seems to be the order of the day. A RES for LNER Edi-Lon is very much advisable. You could-as already explained, even use a train before, say from Greenock to Glas to Edi etc.

Having used my own InterRail yesterday for some trips across south of GB on 4 companies-experience was not the very best bordering on abysmal.

LNER reservations free and simple online or at a station. 

Thank you for your help! The issue is I’ve been trying to add my outbound journeys to the Rail Planner app to generate tickets but it won’t let me add more than one outbound journey e.g. I can only use one train on this travel day as an outbound journey. Is there any way to get around this?

The app only generates a ticket once the pass is activated. The advice is don’t do that before you travel or you could lose a travel day. (See advice elsewhere in community).

The process in the app is that for the whole duration of your pass you create one trip. This is like a birthday diary - you can add or remove at will and simply use it when you transfer to your pass on the day of travel. Until you travel you can remove the train from the pass and replace with others.

The app creates travel days as you add a train to the pass and generates a QR code that is your ticket to show. It is one QR code for the travel day so extra trains on the day use the same code. Extra trains are normally added from the planner to your trip then to your pass, but if not shown you can easily add them manually. There is absolutely no problem travelling on any number of trains on any travel day, even if added manually.

On the 2 In/out days you can use them in the UK you can go anywhere on any number of trains. 

Here is some useful information from the experienced travellers in the Community regarding both planning, reservations and activation of pass and travel days. 

 Planning

The rail planner is normally not up to date, as it only is updated once a month, so to be sure of the time table you better check the timetable and availability on the websites of the national railways. The bigger national railways, like DB (Germany) SBB (Switzerland) and ÖBB (Austria) cover several countries. 

 Reservations 

The advice from the experienced travellers in the community is to use other ways to make reservations than the Interrail/Eurail website.  You can look at the guide in the link:

https://community.eurail.com/train-connections-reservations-47/how-to-get-reservations-105

If you, after having looked at the guide, have questions about how to make specific reservation, please give your travel details (departure date, time and route) preferably in a new topic, and you will get advice.

Please note that Interrail/Eurail charges an extra fee of 2 EUR per person and train in addition to the fee for the seat reservation.

 Activation of pass

During the activation process, when you choose the start day of the validity of the pass, the first day of the validity period is automatically made a travel day, even if you don't enter a journey, the advice is therefore not to activate the pass before the first travel day as you only can deactivate the pass before 00.00 on the day the validity starts. If your travel plans change in the last moment you will loose travel days if you have activated the pass in advance.

It can be wise to make a test and activate the pass with a start date well in the future and then deactivate the pass immediately, just to see that everything works.

 Activation of travel day

The advice from the experienced travellers in the community is also never to activate a travel day, that is connect a journey to your pass, until just before boarding the train, otherwise you might loose a travel day if your travel plans change in a late stage  You can't delete a travel day in the past. A travel day can only be deleted until 23.59 CET the day before the travel day.

@Ella Weir @Yorkie @cdwatkins19 

Please note that travel days are in CE (S)T which means that for travels in the UK a travel day is from 23.00 - 22.59 GM(S)T.

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