My old mate, Barry, up in Newcastle rang me out of the blue last week. Said he finally tracked down that stupidly rare, early 90s vinyl I’d been hunting for years. The catch? I had to go pick it up personally this weekend, otherwise he was selling it to some hipster down in London. The other catch? I was proper skint. Payday felt like a million miles away, and I needed to get from Leeds to Newcastle and back for the absolute minimum amount of cash possible.
I hate spending money on transport. It’s the worst kind of necessary expense. So, I decided I was going to document my whole cheap travel mission. Forget convenience, forget speed. This was purely about finding the bottom dollar. The battle was set: Train vs. Bus.
The Train Trap: Fast but Frighteningly Pricy
My first thought, naturally, was the train. It’s the easiest, usually taking just over an hour. I decided to check prices for a Saturday morning trip, leaving Leeds around 9 AM and returning Sunday evening. Crucially, I wasn’t booking three months in advance; I was booking just three days out, which is usually where you get shafted.
I opened up the usual comparison sites, punching in the dates. This is what I saw:
- LNER/Direct Service (Peak Time Single): Around £45.00. That’s one way!
- Off-Peak Single (Still LNER, must commit to time): Maybe £29.50.
- Northern Rail/CrossCountry (Multiple Changes, Slowest Route): The cheaper singles were hovering around £22.00, but they involved changing at York, sometimes even Darlington, and added nearly an hour to the journey.
When I totaled up a flexible return ticket, even trying to juggle the ‘Anytime Return’ with split ticketing tricks, I couldn’t get the price below about sixty-five quid. Sixty-five pounds just to sit on a train for a couple of hours? Absolutely not. That would blow my entire weekend budget right there. The train was immediately ruled out. It’s a convenience tax, not a viable option for true budget travel when booking late.
The Bus Grind: The True Cost of Cheapness
Right, time to get serious. It was either National Express or Megabus. Everyone knows coaches are slower, but how much slower, and how much cheaper? That’s what I needed to find out.
I started with National Express first. Their service is generally seen as slightly more reliable and maybe a bit cleaner. I searched the same dates. The results were immediate and much more palatable:
- National Express Single (Midday departure): £17.50. Okay, better.
- National Express Return: Managed to stitch together a return for about £32.00.
Thirty-two quid return is a massive saving compared to the sixty-five pound train ticket. But I had a nagging feeling I could do better. When you’re truly budget-minded, every pound counts. Time to check the notorious Megabus.
I hit the Megabus site. This is where you have to be tactical. You look for the weird, less popular timings. Not the 10 AM departure, but the 8:15 AM one, or the really late 2 PM one. The journey time for the coach is pretty consistent, clocking in at around 2 hours 45 minutes to 3 hours, depending on traffic through Durham.
I scrolled down the list of departures, and there it was. Like a little ray of cheap sunshine.
A single ticket for the Saturday 1:45 PM departure, arriving just before 5 PM in Newcastle, was priced at a staggering £5.90.
Five pounds ninety pence! That’s less than a decent pint. I nearly fell off my chair. I quickly checked the return journey for Sunday evening. Found one leaving Newcastle at 7 PM for £8.50.
The Final Tally and The Hidden Price
I booked it immediately. Didn’t even second guess it. The total cost for the return journey from Leeds to Newcastle, booked only three days prior, came out to:
£5.90 (Outbound) + £8.50 (Return) = £14.40 Total.
Compare that to the cheapest viable train route at £65.00 return. I had saved over fifty quid just by accepting three hours of sitting on a coach instead of one hour on a train.
The journey itself was exactly what you’d expect from a Megabus. Cramped, slightly sweaty, and we stopped for absolutely ages at a service station near Wetherby for no reason that I could work out. The WiFi didn’t work, and the bloke next to me spent the entire trip listening to some dreadful metal music through headphones that clearly didn’t fit properly.
But here’s why I’m sharing this whole detailed breakdown. It wasn’t just about saving money this time; it was about proving a point. This whole trip to Newcastle only happened because I’d had a massive argument with my landlord back in Leeds. The heating broke, he refused to fix it, saying it was ‘seasonal wear and tear’, and then he tried to hit me with an extra fee for ‘maintenance consultation’. I told him exactly where to stick his consultation and decided I needed to get out of the city for a couple of days to cool off and use someone else’s heating system. My mate Barry’s offer was the perfect excuse.
If I had to pay £65 for that escape, I wouldn’t have gone. The high cost of the train would have kept me trapped in a cold house arguing with a rogue landlord. But finding that £14.40 bus ticket? That freedom was priceless.
The verdict is clear, folks: If you are genuinely looking for the cheapest way to travel short notice, and you can stomach three hours of discomfort, the coach system, specifically Megabus if you snag those odd-hour deals, absolutely annihilates the train on price. You just have to be willing to spend time, not cash.