I’ve been even quieter than usual lately because I’ve been on holiday. Just got back the other day – San Francisco is lovely at this time of the year, although I am still feeling the jet lag a bit.

Anyway, I’ll get to the point. I just stumbled upon a new way of booking train tickets in the UK, and if you ask me it’s the best out there. By a mile.

Admittedly, that’s not saying an awful lot. The current train ticketing websites are pretty much universally awful. For the full story, check out my previous post on the subject.

Virgin’s site was the best of a bad bunch, but now GNER’s new ‘mixing desk’ actually delivers a reasonably pleasant experience. It looks to be in some sort of testing phase, but you can use it to book tickets – I just picked up a return to Edinburgh as part of their handy five quid promotion.

Ok, I’d be lying if I said I’d given the site a thorough test, and they still have some design issues to sort out (it doesn’t render properly in Firefox, though my non-standard font size may have something to do with that). But give it a go – it makes it finding the cheapest fares much easier.

A definite step forward, and one that might force the other vendors to up their efforts in a similar fashion. From what I’ve seen so far: good work.