First Trans Pennine Express Tickets Online
 

We are interested in purchasing advance tickets online on the First Trans Pennine Express website. We will be traveling from Liverpool Lime St. to York, then to Edinburgh Waverly, and back to Manchester Airport. Has anyone booked tickets online and retrieved the tickets at a railway station? We are traveling to Manchester from Philadelphia USA on US Airways and a friend will pick us up and take us to Liverpool in her car. Suggestions and experiences are appreciated!

Do it all the time - you need the card used to make the booking and the booking reference.

If you have problems paying for the tickets then try a different UK website like eastcoast.co.uk or scotrail.co.uk

Oh - and cheap tickets become available a MAXIMUM of 12 weeks before date of travel, the eastcoast website has a date on it's homepage telling you what the current booking window is

I did same -- booked online to retrieve from kiosk at station (Liverpool Picadilly).
My memory may be blurred a little, but I think I was a bit irritated as I only spotted ticket machines for Virgin Rail and Northern Rail at Picadilly, but not ones for Transpennine.
But then found out that you would retrieve the Transpennine tickets from the machine for Northern Rail.
Maybe alan or someone else from the UK can verify, if that is correct or if my memory just plays a trick on me.

The principle is that you book (and pay for) the tickets online. In the course of this transaction, you're given a booking reference, and asked to nominate a station to collect the tickets from.

In practice, wherever you nominate you can collect the tickets from any compatible ticket machine (virtually any in the country except a tiny handful operated by the Heathrow Express and by the subChannel Eurostar, and except for a number of local metro-style machines)

You take the booking reference and the card you used for the booking to a machine, go to "collect tickets" and give the booking reference/insert the card as prompted. The card in this transaction doesn't get involved with chips and PINs, so cards from steam-age economies work fine.

Though the process is painless, it's always possible you might arrive at Lime St with insufficient time. On Merseyside, all stations on the metro system have (I believe) ticket machines plugged into the national railway ticketing system, so it's probably wise while you're with your friends to pop into the local Merseyrail station and collect the tickets from its machine.

If there's a problem (there occasionally can be), human ticket sellers at major stations can intervene - but at major stations these days, there's always a queue for the humans, while 99% of the time, most machines out on the station concourse are sitting there unused (except of course when you're in a hurry)

Some train operators use e-tickets as well. But your routing involves trains run by probably three different companies, not all of whom operate e-tickets. So you do need to collect the cardboard tickets for the whole of your journey before your first ride.

Thanks to everyone for your help!

Update: I tried to purchase tickets online, but the First Transpennine website could not process a credit card issued outside the UK. A customer service rep. gave me a telephone number to call in the UK for help with this matter. The person was able to take all of my train info and credit card over the phone. I received my reference number, so I can retrieve all of my tickets from a machine at Liverpool Lime St. station. Thanks to all for your help!