Trains to and around London

Book London train tickets

Two rail systems share this city and the same ticket gates, and they do not price the same way. The Underground, the Elizabeth line, the DLR and London Overground run on zones, paid by tapping a contactless card or Oyster, and capped by the day and by the week. National Rail runs on tickets bought per journey, where the ticket type matters more than the distance — the same seat on the same train can cost three different amounts depending on what you bought and when.

National Rail counts 18 separate London Terminals: Blackfriars, Cannon Street, Charing Cross, City Thameslink, Euston, Fenchurch Street, King’s Cross, Liverpool Street, London Bridge, Marylebone, Moorgate, Old Street, Paddington, St Pancras International, Vauxhall, Victoria, Waterloo and Waterloo East. They are not interchangeable, several are miles apart, and which one you want is decided entirely by where the train is going.

What follows is which terminal serves where, what the airport and international platforms actually cost, the three National Rail ticket types and the rules that change the price, the railcards worth holding, and the 2026 pay as you go fares and caps.

Eighteen London Terminals, and a ticket not valid at all of them

The phrase printed on a great many tickets is not a station. ‘London Terminals’ is a group of 18, and National Rail sets the limit on it precisely: “Your ticket may be valid at more than 1 London Terminal station, as long as it is on a reasonable route, using National Rail services.”

The operative words are reasonable route. Terminals that sit off your line of route are excluded, because getting to them would mean crossing London by another mode. A ticket up from the Kent coast does not entitle you to arrive at Euston. If you need to reach a different terminal from the one your train uses, that crossing is a separate Underground fare unless a Travelcard covers it.

So the order of decisions is: find the operator, find its London terminal, then price the crossing separately. Doing it the other way round — picking the station you have heard of — is how people end up paying twice.

Which terminal for where

Euston is the southern terminus of the West Coast Main Line and has four operators: Avanti West Coast on intercity services to the Midlands, North West England, North Wales and Scotland; Caledonian Sleeper overnight to Scotland; London Northwestern Railway; and London Overground. Network Rail describes it as “a gateway from London to popular destinations like Birmingham, Liverpool, Manchester, Edinburgh and Glasgow”. For those cities the answer is Euston and nowhere else.

King’s Cross works the East Coast corridor with five operators: London North Eastern Railway to Yorkshire and Scotland, Lumo to Edinburgh, Grand Central to Yorkshire and Sunderland, Hull Trains to Stevenage and Hull, and Great Northern to Cambridge. Five operators broadly sharing one route is unusual, and it is worth reading whose name is on your ticket before boarding the next train that happens to be going your way.

St Pancras International is next door and does four separate jobs: Eurostar to Amsterdam, Brussels and Paris, Southeastern high speed into Kent, East Midlands Railway, and Govia Thameslink to Bedford, Luton and Brighton, taking in Luton and Gatwick airports on the way.

Waterloo is the one to expect to be vast — Network Rail calls it plainly “Britain’s largest station”, with 24 platforms — yet it has a single train operator, South Western Railway, covering the south west of London and beyond. Liverpool Street is the busy one: 17 platforms and, in Network Rail’s words, “As Britain’s busiest station, it serves around 80 million passengers every year”. Greater Anglia runs from there to Cambridgeshire, Essex, Hertfordshire, Norfolk and Suffolk, including Stansted and Southend airports and Harwich International Port, alongside London Overground to Chingford, Cheshunt and Enfield Town and the Elizabeth line. One catch worth knowing: c2c normally uses Fenchurch Street and appears at Liverpool Street only as an alternative terminus during engineering work and for some weekend trains via Stratford — check on the day rather than on the timetable you looked at last week.

Victoria faces south: Southeastern to south east London, Kent, the South East coast and the Medway Towns; Southern to south London, Sussex, Brighton and the South Coast; and Gatwick Express from platforms 13/14. Paddington faces west, with Great Western Railway to the West and South West of England, plus the two Heathrow services covered below.

The airport and international platforms

Paddington is where the same destination carries three different prices. Of its three operators, two run to Heathrow. Heathrow Express takes 15 minutes to Heathrow Central for Terminals 2 and 3 and is priced as a premium product: £26.00 Standard single, £30.00 same-day return, £42.00 return, and £32.00 / £36.00 / £46.00 in PREMIER+. Booked 30 or more days out, an Advance Discounted Single starts from £10.00, and children aged 15 and under travel free. The Elizabeth line does the same trip in under 40 minutes, serves all terminals and takes contactless or Oyster; the Piccadilly line takes under an hour and also serves all terminals.

Two rules decide whether the Express is worth it. First, the Elizabeth line adds a Heathrow supplement on top of the normal zonal fare: from March 2026 that is £9.60 via Zone 1 and £6.50 not via Zone 1 for pay as you go, or £6.50 and £4.60 on cash fares. Second, Heathrow Express accepts Oyster but its journeys are excluded from TfL daily and Monday to Sunday caps and from Travelcards, so the fare lands on top of everything else you spend that day rather than being absorbed by a cap you were going to hit anyway.

Gatwick Express runs direct to Victoria in 31 minutes, with 10 per cent off for booking online or in the app and a Kids for £2 offer. Carnets are pre-purchased books of single tickets at a 10 per cent discount, valid three months, and no other discount can be combined with one. Like Heathrow Express, it counts towards no TfL cap.

For Eurostar at St Pancras, the number that matters is the gate, not the departure. Ticket gates close 30 minutes before departure for Standard and Plus, and 15 minutes before for Premier; Eurostar recommends arriving 75 minutes ahead in Standard and Plus, 45 in Premier. Arriving at the advertised departure time is arriving half an hour late. The wider airport-versus-rail comparison is on the London flights page.

Advance, Off-Peak and Anytime, and what a penalty costs

Advance is the cheap tier and the inflexible one. You can usually buy up to 12 weeks ahead of travel, and on many routes they remain available on the day, sometimes up to 10 minutes before departure. The trade is absolute: the ticket is valid only on the date and the train specified, and “Advance tickets are non-refundable, unless your train is delayed or cancelled and you choose not to travel.” Changing one may cost £10 plus any difference in price, so an Advance ticket on a train you are not certain of can cost more than the Off-Peak you avoided.

Off-Peak is defined by the clock and then qualified by the small print: “Off-Peak hours begin at 09:30 from Monday to Friday in cities and large towns, and at 09:00 everywhere else.” Weekends and bank holidays are Off-Peak all day. Every Off-Peak and Super Off-Peak ticket also carries a Restriction Code that sets when it is genuinely valid, and the code beats the headline time. If a ticket is unusually cheap for the route, the code is the reason and it is worth reading before you commit to a return working.

Anytime carries no restriction, which is what you are buying. It is the fallback for a journey whose timing is not yet fixed rather than a deal, and on a route where the Advance tickets have sold out it is often the only thing left.

Travelling without the right ticket is expensive on the mainline. The National Rail penalty fare is £100 plus the full single fare for the intended journey, reduced to £50 plus that fare if paid within 21 days. It is issued under the Railways (Penalty Fares) Regulations 2018 and the 2022 Amendment and applies when travelling from a Penalty Fare station or inside a Compulsory Ticket Area — both marked by yellow warning posters at the entry points, which are the posters worth reading rather than walking past.

Railcards, and the minimum fares that cancel the saving

The London-specific one is the Network Railcard: £35 for a year, covering London and the South East, giving a third off up to 4 adult tickets including your own and 60 per cent off up to 4 child tickets for ages 5 to 15. It only works after 10am Monday to Friday, all day at weekends and on public holidays, and it has a floor: “A minimum fare of £13 applies Monday to Friday only, and a £1 minimum fare applies to child tickets, ages 5 to 15, at all times”. On a short commuter hop the minimum fare eats the discount entirely; on a group day out to the coast it pays for itself in one trip.

The 16-25 Railcard is £35 for a year or £80 for three, with a £12 minimum fare before 10am Monday to Friday — a floor that does not apply to Advance tickets, on public holidays, or during July and August. The Two Together Railcard is £35 a year for two named people aged 16 or over, valid from 9:30am Monday to Friday and any time at weekends and on public holidays, and both named adults must start and end the journey together; if one gets off early, both tickets become invalid. It also imposes a £23.60 minimum fare on an Anytime Day Travelcard bought from outside Zones 1-9, which is exactly the 2026 price of the Zones 1-6 Anytime Day Travelcard, so on that one product the discount is cancelled completely.

The Senior Railcard starts at age 60 at £35 for a year or £80 for three, but is “not valid during the morning peak period when travelling between 2 stations in the Network Railcard area”, which is most of London, except on public holidays. The Disabled Persons Railcard is the cheapest of the main cards at £20 for a year and £54 for three, giving a third off for the cardholder and one accompanying adult.

The part most visitors miss is that a railcard can be loaded onto the Tube. Set a National Railcard discount — 16-25, 26-30, HM Forces, Senior or Veterans — on an Oyster card and “your individual off-peak pay as you go fares for journeys on Tube, DLR, London Overground, Elizabeth line or National Rail will be a third lower than the equivalent adult rate”, with the off-peak daily cap cut by a third too. You must register the Oyster card by creating an online account, and carry the railcard to show on request. In money: the off-peak daily cap falls from £8.90 to £5.90 for Zones 1-2 and from £16.30 to £10.85 for Zones 1-6 — but the peak daily cap is unchanged at £8.90 and £16.30, so on a day of peak-only travel the discount delivers nothing at all. The Disabled Persons Railcard is the exception: on Oyster it gives a third off fares and daily caps “at any time”, peak included.

Pay as you go in 2026: two peaks a day, and where the caps stop

Fares rose on 1 March 2026: “On the Tube, and other rail services in London where Tube fares apply, pay as you go (PAYG) single fares will increase by 6 per cent overall.” A one-zone journey including Zone 1 went from £2.90 to £3.10 peak and from £2.80 to £3.00 off-peak. The full adult scale for journeys including Zone 1, peak then off-peak: 1 zone £3.10 / £3.00; 2 zones £3.60 / £3.10; 3 zones £3.90 / £3.30; 4 zones £4.80 / £3.60; 5 zones £5.30 / £3.80; 6 zones £5.90 / £4.00.

Journeys that avoid Zone 1 are on a different and cheaper scale: £2.30 peak / £2.20 off-peak for one zone, rising to £3.80 / £2.60 across five. Those were also the steepest rises in the March revision, up 9.5 per cent peak and 10.0 per cent off-peak against 6.9 and 7.1 for the Zone 1 equivalents — the orbital routes are catching up. A further correction on 5 July 2026 moved three off-peak fares, the zone combinations 34567, 345678 and 3456789, up 10p to £2.50.

Peak is two windows a day, not one morning. TfL is explicit: “Peak PAYG fares apply from 06:30 to 09:30; and from 16:00 to 19:00 Monday to Friday (excluding public holidays).” Between those windows, and all day on a public holiday, you pay off-peak. The evening window then has a hole in it that almost nobody quotes: “On all fare scales, the off-peak fare is also charged for PAYG journeys starting between 16:00 and 19:00, Monday to Friday, and ending in Zone 1.” Heading into the centre at 5pm on a weekday is an off-peak fare; heading out of it is not.

The caps are where the system becomes forgiving. The adult daily cap is £8.90 for Zone 1 only and for Zones 1-2, £10.50 Zones 1-3, £12.80 Zones 1-4, £15.30 Zones 1-5 and £16.30 Zones 1-6 — and for all of those the peak and off-peak cap is the same number. They first diverge at Zones 1-7, at £17.80 peak against £16.30 off-peak. Capping also runs Monday to Sunday: £44.70 Zones 1-2, £52.50 Zones 1-3, £64.20 Zones 1-4, £76.40 Zones 1-5 and £81.60 Zones 1-6, the same prices as the equivalent 7 Day Travelcards. Travelcards and the multi-modal caps were frozen in March 2026 while singles rose 6 per cent, because they are set with the train operators and follow the National Rail fares policy the government announced on 23 November 2025.

What counts towards a cap is wider than the Tube: “The caps below apply to all Tube, DLR, Elizabeth line and London Overground services, and most National Rail services in Zones 1-9”, so a suburban National Rail hop inside London feeds the same cap as your Underground travel. Five kinds of journey never count towards any daily or weekly cap: the London Cable Car, Thames Clippers River Bus, Gatwick Express, Heathrow Express, and Southeastern high speed between St Pancras and Stratford International. Buses and trams have their own separate cap — £5.25 a day and a £1.75 single, frozen until 04:30 on 1 November 2026 and then £5.55 and £1.85, with the Hopper letting you make further bus or tram journeys free within an hour of first touching in on the same card. The detail is on the London buses page.

Three ways the tap goes wrong. “If you do not touch in at the start and touch out at the end of your journey, you may be charged a maximum fare and this journey will not be included in any daily capping” — so one missed touch both overcharges you and removes that trip from the cap protecting the rest of the day. Every journey has a maximum journey time set by the zones, the day and the time; exceeding it is charged as two maximum fares. And pink card readers at interchange stations exist to record the route you took: touch one when you change trains so you are charged for the route you actually used, and touch it too if you hold a Travelcard that excludes Zone 1, to avoid an extension fare. You still touch in and out on the yellow readers as normal. TfL’s penalty fare is £100 on bus, Tube, tram, DLR, London Overground and Elizabeth line services, reduced to £50 if paid within 21 days of the notice being issued.

If tapping does not suit, the paper products still exist. An Anytime Day Travelcard is £16.60 for Zones 1-4 and £23.60 for Zones 1-6; the Zones 1-6 off-peak version is £16.60 and is valid for journeys starting after 09:30 Monday to Friday and at any time at weekends and on public holidays. Season prices are pure arithmetic from the seven-day price: monthly is 3.84 times it rounded up to the nearest 10p and annual is exactly 40 times it, so the £44.70 Zones 1-2 week gives £171.70 a month and £1,788 a year. Children are cheap to the point of being an afterthought: the child off-peak daily cap for Zones 1-6 stays at £1.90 and the child off-peak Day Travelcard for Zones 1-6 at £8.30. On Oyster, weekly capping is also retrospective — the Monday to Sunday cap can be amended after a best-value check across the whole week, with any refund issued as pay as you go credit you collect on your next journey. Leave it uncollected for six months and it stops appearing automatically, though Customer Services can reissue it within the following six.

Common questions

Which London station do I need for Manchester, Birmingham or Glasgow?

Euston. It is the southern terminus of the West Coast Main Line, and Network Rail calls it a gateway to Birmingham, Liverpool, Manchester, Edinburgh and Glasgow. Four operators use it: Avanti West Coast on the intercity services, Caledonian Sleeper overnight to Scotland, London Northwestern Railway and London Overground.

When do peak Tube fares apply?

In two windows, not one: 06:30 to 09:30 and 16:00 to 19:00, Monday to Friday, excluding public holidays. There is one important exception — a journey starting between 16:00 and 19:00 on a weekday and ending in Zone 1 is charged the off-peak fare on all fare scales, so travelling into the centre in the evening peak is not a peak fare.

How far ahead should I buy an Advance ticket?

You can usually buy up to 12 weeks before travel, and on many routes Advance tickets are still on sale on the day, sometimes up to 10 minutes before departure. The catch is that they are valid only on the specified date and train and are non-refundable unless the train is delayed or cancelled and you choose not to travel. Changing one may cost £10 plus any difference in price.

Does a Railcard make Tube travel cheaper?

Yes, if you set the National Railcard discount on an Oyster card and register it with an online account. A 16-25, 26-30, HM Forces, Senior or Veterans Railcard cuts off-peak pay as you go fares and the off-peak daily cap by a third — the Zones 1-2 off-peak cap drops from £8.90 to £5.90. It does nothing at peak, where the cap stays at £8.90. The Disabled Persons Railcard is the exception and applies at any time.

What happens if I forget to touch out?

You may be charged a maximum fare, and that journey is excluded from daily capping altogether, so it does not count towards the cap that would otherwise have limited your spend. Separately, each journey has a maximum journey time based on the zones, the day and the time; going over it is charged as two maximum fares. Travelling without a valid ticket carries a £100 penalty fare, halved to £50 if paid within 21 days.

Does the Heathrow Express count towards my daily cap?

No. Heathrow Express takes Oyster but its journeys are excluded from every TfL daily and Monday to Sunday cap and from Travelcards, along with Gatwick Express, the London Cable Car, Thames Clippers and Southeastern high speed between St Pancras and Stratford International. A Standard single is £26.00 for the 15-minute run from Paddington, with Advance Discounted Singles from £10.00 at 30 or more days out and free travel for children aged 15 and under. The Elizabeth line takes under 40 minutes and carries a Heathrow supplement of £9.60 via Zone 1.

Sources

Fares, journey times and operating rules on this page were checked against these sources on 11 September 2026. Authorities change fares and timetables without notice — confirm anything time-critical on the operator’s own site.

• National Rail - Travelling in London, the 18 London Terminals and ticket validity
• Network Rail - London Euston station page, operators and destinations
• Network Rail - London St Pancras International station page, operators
• National Rail - Advance train tickets, booking horizon and refund rules
• National Rail - Off-Peak and Super Off-Peak tickets, restriction times
• Railcard - Network Railcard, price, discount and minimum fares
• Greater London Authority MD3464 - TfL fares from 1 March 2026
• TfL - Adult rate prices 2026 fares table, daily and weekly caps
• TfL Conditions of Carriage, 22 October 2025, capping and penalty rules