Best/Cheapest public transportation for London to Edinburgh?
 

Hi all,
Looking or the best and/or Cheapest way to get from London to Edinburgh (or Plymouth to Edinburgh).

There seems to be a bunch of train lines and coaches etc to go but it's all very confusing. Hoping to get some good solid input on the matter.

Thanks for your help!

I'm afraid that the confusing trains and coaches is the cheapest way to go, well I'd imagine that it is. Personally I'd fly - possibly a little more expensive, but by far the best way to go.

Cheapest way is probably megabus.com (or possibly NationalExpress.com). A very long trip, though.

Flying will cost a lot more than that, but still not much considering how much time you save. Look at www.flybmi.com and www.whichbudget.com

Other are right, absolute cheapest will be coach, but it will be horrible.

I nearly always fly using bmi (www.flybmi.com) as mentioned by Will. It's cheaper the further ahead you book. They usually end up being just about as cheap as or cheaper than any other airline, including Easyjet, by the time you've added on taxes etc. It's a full-service airline, their flights are comparatively pleasant & they fly from Heathrow.

Other airlines flying between London & Edinburgh are BA (www.ba.com - usually more expensive but always worth checking; flying from Heathrow or Gatwick), Easyjet (www.easyjet.com - can be cheap but usually only at inconvenient times; flying from Gatwick, Luton & Stansted) & Scot Airways (www.scotairways.co.uk - expensive business flights flying from London City).

Check the trains too (various sites but I use www.thetrainline.com) : there are theoretically cheap fares but I never seem to see any.

From Plymouth, you can either get the train to Woking then the rail-air coach link to Heathrow; or you can fly from Southampton. Flights from Southampton are with BA (always v. expensive) or FlyBE (www.flybme.com - can be quite cheap if booked well ahead, e.g. I recently booked a one way flight in July for £50).

hi,

my friend and i were looking into this a while ago as we wanted to get up to edinburgh and back from london as cheaply and painlessly as possible.

we actually ended up flying to glasgow on ryanair - you can get really cheap tickets if they're doing one of their (frequent!) special promotions and if you're prepared to fly early in the morning. i would guess that's true of easyjet to edinburgh as well, but at the time we were going, ryanair was much cheaper - enough to make it worth flying to glasgow and then taking the train to edinburgh. fairly painless - and, by the way, you get half price travel on scotrail services from glasgow prestwick if you can show a ticket or booking reference for a flight that has landed that day.

but having spoiled ourselves on the way there by flying, we decided to go for economy and use megabus to get back. very very cheap, but i honestly wouldn't do it again. we were unlucky in that there was something wrong with the air conditioning on the coach, so that the lower deck was freezing and the upper deck boiling hot, so i probably have an over-negative view of it. but i couldn't really recommend it to anyone!

and as has been said, in theory you can get cheap(ish) train fares if you book a certain amount of time in advance (virgin trains), but i've never managed to get them myself!

You can't fly direct to Scotland from Plymouth at present - though the way cheapos spring up these days, who knows what'll be around nest week?

But FlyBe keep on offering silly prices in the papers at the moment, and they do fly from Exeter and Bristol to Edinburgh. May actually work out cheaper than the coach, and both airports are a lot nearer Plymouth than the trek up to London.

No-one can ever tell you what's cheapest. You need to do the sums for the journey you want at the time you want it.

Sorry, ignore what I said about Plymouth, I was thinking of Portsmouth (because someone here recently asked me If I knew how to get there !)