If using "contactless" cards for travel, you must use the same card/device to start and end your journey- otherwise it may cost you £14. If you fail to start your journey using contactless, and are checked by staff mid journey, the cost is £30, but the staff will not know and not be able to tell you. Contactless is ONLY for travel on one day and using paper tickets or the app may be cheaper if weekend or regular travel is involved. NOTE: ONLY paper tickets can be used if you are paying for more than one person.

ANIMALS ARE NOT PERMITTED ON METROLINK TRAMS (except very special prebooked medical journies) - you can usually take your dog on a bus or train, but they are not allowed on the trams. Assistance dogs are permitted but may find the often highly crowded conditions unduly stressful. Consider alternatives if you have any travel difficulties.

Penalty fares are in place at many stations and on many routes. In some places you are required to use a card to purchase a ticket (ticket machines have no cash slots) and some tickets can ONLY be purchased with smart phones.

CARE- Treat all sources of information with doubt especially if your journey is more than a week in the future! Take plenty of food and drink as even a local one hour journey could end up taking six hours (discovered the hard way...). Train services are now highly unreliable.

Check shortly before travelling and assume regular cancellations. Do not rely on making any connections. Don't expect information or help. In the event of an incident affecting travel it is sometimes best to wait a while as management decisions made immediately may be changed several times in a half an hour- cancelled trains are sometimes reinstated or special services found. Some initial advice may not be the best- if told to catch a taxi at your expense, push for something better but expect to wait.

When travelling, beware of using the so called "information points" at railway stations. Calls are a time restricted telephone call to an off-shore call centre, where English is poor, and information is less than is available on line. They can offer no assistance if you need help and no information on any operating problems. The calls are automatically disconnected, usually before you receive any information. Try a mobile call to the station operator- the number may be on a poster at or near the station. Expect to be stranded.

Note that in 2018/19 operators have been avoiding reporting cancelled trains by simply reissuing the timetable a few hours beforehand, you need to check and recheck.

You could find yourself on a bus you didn't know about (or standing on a platform as a replacement bus whizzes past outside!) or stranded in the middle of uninhabited countryside with no assistance.

Note that a ticket price may only cover one particular train booked at one location at one instant! It may be cheaper to split your ticket, especially if you can move a portion of the journey out of peak hours, reduce cross county boundary journeys, or take advantage of greater discounts for shorter journies. NOTE travelling by train within Greater Manchester 1. there is both a morning and evening (4-6.30pm)peak, and 2. Greater Manchester has a secret child train fare of 80p for any journey for a child (5-15) with a full-fare paying adult.

If it goes wrong, remember: if delayed over 15 minutes (newer franchises only eg Wales and Northern- minimums vary), apply for "compensation", which starts at a minimum of 20% for an hours delay, and depending on operator, may be 100% or rarely more (our record is 600%). You may need to contact "Passenger Focus" to resolve problems (we have had to). Update 11/18: Passenger Focus decisions were not enforceable- therefore a binding arbitration procedure has been introduced for SOME problems after 1st December which remain unresolved after 8 weeks with a possibility of £2,500 maximum compensation. They will deal with any complaint under the control of the operator- which will include failure to honour delay repay conditions, but NOT penalty fares (there is separate arbitration for those).

To resolve most railway travel problems (not penalty fares) see the arbitration procedure from the Rail Ombudsman.

To access the official railway data, no javascript or cookies required- use Accessible UK Train Timetables which has the full official data -as up to date as exists for times- but for fares, there are severe problems with the web site for some journeys.

Today's UK train delays which only covers major disruption -and Cleared incidents-

What could be very large pages- "Northern Railway" lists details of MOST (not all) delays at Journeycheck but even this can mislead as operational decisions are made and remade on the fly. Welsh disruptions may be reported on Transport for Wales train disruption page.

UK Live Train Arrival and Departure Boards gives arrivals and departures in the next few hours. NOTE a train shows as NO REPORT until it passes a reporting point. From Traintimes -as NationalRail website is discriminatory.
Beware of duplicated station names! Do you want Adlington (Lancs) or Adlington (Ches)!

Check your trains progress::
With details of booked train paths including freight and steam specials from Realtimetrains. The train may not run or may be delayed or cancelled or rerouted. The headcode (eg 1G45) indicates the class of train- starting with a 1 or 2 for passenger, and 4,6,7,8 for freight while 5 is empty carriages. The Ind code may be Working TimeTable(WTT), Variation (VAR), Short Term (special- generally needs up to an hour to be passed around the system once started) (STP), or CANcelled. Click on the headcode for route information. Enter a station, site or junction name. Pass means it passes the point without stopping. NR means No Report- if you see this at a station the train is meant to stop at, the train may have been diverted at short notice.

As an alternative, requiring javascript to work but with more data than the above- Open Rail (Charlwood House) live rail - requires TIPLOC code or station 3 letter code for best results (see next link). The best for tracking route diversions- you need to locate the train on its scheduled route then select the train to find out where it really went.

Twitter feeds for: Northern Rail    ||   Metrolink (Manchester)

The official National Rail website

Station codes - eg three letter station (TLS) codes used for example by manual ticket office or train crew machines, useful if you are told they can't issue a ticket to a station. For example in Manchester a ticket to TLC/CRS/NRS MCZ (which may print on the ticket as Manchester CTLZ) includes travel on central zone Metrolink trams from your central Manchester rail station of choice to the city centre. TLC codes originally referred (as CRS or NRS) to Reservation Systems and are now used under the generic title "three letter codes" for station locations.
The NLC code for Manchester with central Metrolink travel is 0451 (sometimes as 045100), compared to Manchester Stations which is 0438. Link to Phil's web site with list of CRS (aka TLC and also NRS), NLC, TIPLOC and STANOX codes. .

Railway fares in the UK are a nightmare, and very often the headline price - the one you will probably be charged- is not the cheapest fare available, despite regulations to the contrary. You can also lose a lot of money in penalty fares if you accidentally get on a train not appropriate to the fare you have paid- and it is very none obvious. While I don't like linking to sites that require javascript, hurrah for a US based website that gives FULL details of ticket restrictions and fares.

What routes ARE permitted? Not easy to find out and not all obvious routes are permitted while some odd ones are- in theory if National Rail suggest a route and DO NOT say separate tickets are required, a route is permitted- but the usual dislocations may amend this for short periods of time! Official ATOC routeing guide to the rescue. A set of PDF files which, if you work through them carefully and as directed will tell you just how complex routeing really is - and what is and isn't permitted. Be sure to check the "easements" section as some are negative easements, forbidding journeys more generally or logically permitted. Unfortunately permitted routes seem to be changeable without notice and apparently without any formally recognised procedure.

Mapping with javascript required and footpaths well shown from Opencyclemap.org
Also requiring javascript, a wide choice of mapping tiles (style) from Graphhopper.com.
The icon in top right of both of these maps allows you to change the appearance of the map tiles.
Also Open Street Map (Open Street Map search has a limited use search facility via Nominatim with restricted bandwidth. May stop functioning for a few seconds and instead use a placename only search).
The standard openstreetmap shop has hundreds of little icons scattered over it and no obvious key- the colour of the icon is important and helps you to find the right category at Openstreetmap icons- note this only applies to the standard map not the special tiles.