I’m of an age when I qualify for both but am only allowed one. It occurs to me that this must be true of many Afterworders.
I have a decision to make. You decide!
Bus Pass or Railcard?
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Depends where you live.
For me it would be a rail card as the buses in Oxfordshire in my area are frequent and good value at £2 per journey.
I’m clear what a railcard does. 30% off your tickets when you buy them. But, they cost £30 a year (£70 for three).
Bus passes are free and last five years. Is each journey then free or discounted? Nowhere states clearly.
I don’t understand only being allowed one, I’m just using my rail pass today to travel home. 19 quid from London to Yorkshire.
Bus pass used to get to King’s Cross no payment. If you have an English pass you can use it free over England, but you have to pay in Wales and probably Scotland.
Presumably, in order to travel by train in the UK for less than what the petrol would have cost you for the same journey, you have to buy a ticket for a non-rush-hour train departing at a specific time?
i.e. you can’t just rock up to the station and catch the next one that happens along?
Bus pass is all free I though.
Mine’s supposed to give me free bus travel anywhere in England (i.e. not in the Principality), but I haven’t ever put that to the test. There are a few time limitations – e.g. no buses before 9 in the morning on weekdays, but hey, that’s not really an issue.
Also, there’s a specific definition of what constitutes a ‘bus’ and it won’t include National Express coaches and the like, making long distance usage basically impractical.
“This does not usually include long distance bus and coach services but you can check with the operator before you travel.”
Here’s that t you lost. t
It’s 9:30 before they can be used. Years ago before I needed one if the person got on before 9:30 they were known as ‘twirlies’ as in “Oh am I twirly?”.
When I went in before my impending national pension age I went in to the local authority help desk to ask how I could get a blue badge. They did the application straight away at the end I was asked if I’d like a disabled bus pass which I didn’t know you could get. They then did that for me. I managed to use it a few times then covid lockdown happened.
Not round ‘yer – you can leap from your bed a little earlier if you so wish:
“In South Gloucestershire, Bristol, Bath and North East Somerset, you can use your Diamond Travelcard Monday to Friday from 9am through to 2am the next day. At weekends and bank holidays you can use your Diamond Travelcard all day.
In the rest of England, you can use your Travelcard Monday to Friday from 9:30am to 11pm and all day at weekends and bank holidays.”
“residents of East Dorset entitled to a free bus pass are also entitled to all-day travel, not limited to off-peak hours.”
I’m sure I’ve seen where free bus travel passes have to be paid for (annual charge) in some parts of the country or are restricted to local travel only.
I have a free National Bus Pass and I once had a Senior Railcard (now expired) that cost £30 a year and gave a 30% discount, including on London tube and overground trains. I have used my Hertfordshire-issued bus pass in Sheffield without any problems and on London buses.
If they live in a London borough, pensioners can get a free bus, tube and overground travel pass.
Not just for pensioners in London all over 60s who live in a Borough.
I think in England there are several types of bus pass. London is a special case. I think the most common one is the ENCTS card. If that’s what you can have, there’s a gov.uk page that details it.
You’re not only allowed one. You re entitled to your local authority Bus Pass. The railcard is operated by the Association of Train Operating Companies (ATOC). If it is worthwhile, buy one.
Depends on what you want to use it for
Getting around day-to-day – bus pass
Going further afield – railcard
I elected for a railcard as there is no bus service in the rural corner of Ireland where I live
Are you in the Republic? I understood that it’s free on all public transport, rail or bus, here for anyone over 66. I’m 7 years away and looking forward to it.
Hi, B,
You’re right – it’s a travel pass so does both.
I am indeed (Roscommon so no local buses). How about you?
Do you get up to Dublin for gigs much? I go up about once a month so
we should try and get together if we’re ever at the same event
I’m in Maynooth which is very handy for public transport. There’s even a late bus service that passes just around the corner from my favourite pub in Dublin and leaves me at the end of our street. I get in for gigs once every month or two but I’d be in Dublin for pints more regularly than that.
Fingers crossed, we’ll have better finances in the near future so I expect I’ll be going to more gigs then.
I don’t have much lined up in the near future; Declan O’Rourke, Joan as Police Woman, Ghost-Note and the Undertones off the top of my head. Let me know if you’re heading up for anything. Your train probably passes through here.
I’m in NI, and we get free travel on bus & rail (within NI) from the age of 60. I can get a ticket on the Enterprise from Belfast to Dublin, and just have to pay for the part of the journey from Newry to Connolly station.
At 65, that free travel then extends to the rest of the island.
Both, surely. I seldom use a bus but can see it may become something I choose (or have to) do.
I’ve got the old git railcard which easily pays for itself, and the buss pass which is free. Easy.
Me too. Don’t understand this can only have one business. My Kent bus pass gets me free bus travel in London, which is handy, but not tube, which isn’t.
Plus if you have both, you can get further discounts on train travel.
How so?
It applies in Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire. Tickets must be bought from a ticket office.
https://www.railforums.co.uk/threads/senior-peoples-concessionary-bus-pass-on-trains.268662/
Same in w Yorkshire half price within w Yorkshire with the concessionary travel pass. Can be used on line too.
Got a free bus pass or getting around locally and when away in the camper (England only).
I could get a discounted rail card as I qualify for a disabled pass ‘cos I have a hearing aid. That would give me, and my “carer” 30% off rail travel, but my experience of rail service lately is dire. My last 5 trips to London entailed 3 of them finishing in a taxi as the trains were either cancelled or stopped before the end of journey for one reason or another.
I’ll get a railcard first. Then, I’ll get a three year bus pass!
World! Here I come!
The bus pass lasts longer than three years.
English National bus pass is for 5 years at a time.
I’ll get the three year railcard, then the five year bus pass.
Something I discovered, sadly just before the Covid lockdown so I never got much use from it, was that if you had an Oyster card for London Tube/Overground travel you could link it to your Senior Railcard and automatically get the 30% discount on the Oyster, without having to use the Railcard first at the ticket barriers.
Unfortunately, you can’t link the Railcard to your bank card, so I found that to get the discount I’d have to revert to using the Oyster card (and keep it topped-up), when I’d got accustomed to just using my bank card on the Tube.
I didn’t know that either. Hmmm, off to Oyster.
At moment just a rail card. Good value as I can get to see my daughter in London for about £23 return which is much cheaper than the car, And cleaner and I can read too.
Don’t recall anything nice about buses.
Buses are currently more reliable than Overground, around my side of London.
@Mike_H yes to clarify I was basing my comments of buses on my memory of using them when I first started working. Double deckers, smoking on top where it seems every passenger except me and my mates were consumptive. Germ ridden and not exactly pleasant.
Many buses have free Wi-Fi these days!
I have a free bus pass and buy an annual Senior Railcard these days – that pays for itself if you only ever use it once, or maybe twice at most.
Hint – use Tesco vouchers to buy your Railcard and it is half price as you get double the voucher value, although that is only available for the one year version. Bargain!
What REALLY annoys me is that Londoners get a Freedom pass that allows travel via any method…bus, tube, overground….and at any time. Out in the sticks we only get a bus pass, and restrictions about the time of day. Round here it used to stop around 10.30pm too, but I think they have dropped that now. There also used to be different rules in Exeter to outside of the city, so you could use the same bus in one authority at a certain time, but it changed when you crossed over the ‘border’, so to speak. Absolute madness.
Slightly annoying that English bus passes aren’t valid in Scotland or Wales. Or, presumably, in Norn Iron.
But I discovered yesterday that you can register your Senior Railcard online and thus get the 30% discount for online bookings.
Only if you bought it on line. Just been through this. If you bought it at the station you can’t register it on line which is utterly stupid.
Who are you registering the card with @Mike_H ? On Trainline I just have to say I’ve got a senior railcard and it applies the discount, I didn’t have to register it.
I haven’t done it personally. Was just passing on something that I saw elsewhere.
Sadly the rural bus service out here in the wild west of Cambridgeshire is so unreliable you could make it free for everyone now, and yet anyone who could access a car would not use it.
Offspring the Younger will soon start a job a 10-minute drive, or a two hour bus journey (if it turned up), away. Dad’s Taxi is coming out of retirement.
If it’s anything like here in West Herts, it’s a combination of greedy bus operators* and a County Council that doesn’t care about public transport. Services are unreliable (broken down buses, shortage of drivers = frequent cancellations).
Just lately commuter train services hereabouts are pretty shit too. Lots of emergency engineering works, probably due to prior lack of track maintenance.
* Looking at you, Arriva.
We have two “service providers”: a family-run business with old, dirty, smelly, cold-in-winter/hot-in-summer, breaky-downy buses with not enough drivers to meet their timetable commitments, let alone cover for staff absence; and Stagecoach.
Stagecoach take on a rural route for the term of the council bung (six months, say), then decide overnight that the route loses money as soon as it goes out of Cambridge city into the surrounding villages, and so they hand the route back to the council at the end of the bung support period. We’ve had students unable to attend school/college because Stagecoach have pulled out of a route over a weekend.
So the council call up the little family business, who take on the ex-Stagecoach route, which diverts their limited supply of buses and drivers from their existing routes, which makes them even less reliable, etc.
Step and repeat, about every six months…
There’s a sort of cascade effect with public transport. For the last decade or more, Government haven’t valued public transport so it’s been underfunded and even those councils that DO value it can’t fund it properly. Many county councils didn’t value it any more than central government anyway.
And now almost all local authorities are either effectively broke or severely cash-strapped. What little money they have tends to get spent in the urban centres, not out in the sticks.
My 87 year old father in law now needs to take 2 buses to get 2 miles to the shops as the one which went all the way was discontinued. And he lives on a largeish estate so he’s not the only potential customer this affects. Utterly rubbish service.
Since just about every Local Authority in the land has gone bust, public transport subsidy is one of the areas where they are trying to make savings.
And since Covid, the big bus companies are concentrating on keeping their shareholders happy, not their customers.
Who, like me, hopes in a resurge in public transport now the shits have been flushed? GB rail? Bring it on, and King mentioned buses in his speech, opening Parliament. If it were any good, I’d use.