Fodor's Travel Talk Forums - National Rail UK

You can't buy tickets from National Rail.

If you click "buy now" on the NR site, you're taken to the site of whichever of the couple of dozen Train Operating Companies (TOC) runs the service you've selected. Obviously, each of those companies' sites will have its own idiosyncracy, so generalisations like "doesn't take Amex" don't necessarily apply.

In my experience of running a website aimed at non-UK cardholders, three common problems are buyers entering billing addresses that don't perfectly match what the card company has on file, confusion over postcodes and cards themselves not being authorised for use outside certain territories

Some TOC sites have a small box labelled something like "international address", which you should select if it's there. Some such choices don't necessarily flag the postcode as mandatory from all countries, and you might try it with and without your postcode. In citystates, different card companies may have different protocols for whether you need to enter the city name twice. We get more card complications from physically small countries (like HK, Singapore and Ireland) than the rest of the world put together because of address protocols.

It's also often worth double checking whether you're entering precisely what's on your monthly billing statement (since most of us get them electronically, we rarely actually see the format the cards use any more.)

But an increasingly common recent complication is that the card just isn't authorised for use in the UK. A two second call to the card company will usually fix this.