International Ticketing

I was updating our copy of Retail Manual Part One, which covers various Ticket Office procedures, at work yesterday, and one of the pages that was being updated was the list of stations that can do continental tickets.

The various classes of bookings are Eurostar, "Eurostar Plus", Inter-Rail, Sectional Coupons and Rail-Sea-Rail.

The one I was particularly interested in, on account of being a fairly regular user of continental rail, was sectional coupons. In days of yore, virtually every major station had an International Counter, where you could get such tickets.

Indeed, until quite recently, Cambridge and London Euston offered them. As did London Cannon Street, until the City Travel Centre and Ticket Office closed, to be replaced by a Marks and Spencer Simply Food, and a new, smaller, Ticket Office elsewhere on the lower concourse.

On the previous (February 2005) version of the relevant pages from RM1, the following stations are listed as doing Sectional Coupons:

• Chatham
• Dover Priory
• London Charing Cross
• London Liverpool Street

On the current version, the list is mostly the same, but with Doncaster instead of Dover Priory, which is a far cry from the days when most, if not all, of the 55 stations listed would have done them.

As such, for the vast majority of people, the only realistic option for booking continental tickets is to use either RailEurope or the Deutsche Bahn UK Booking Centre. Bring back BR International...