£27 Guildford to Waterloo - what?

[trainmania100]

Coming from Brighton I thought I'd try my usual tactic of getting cheaper rail prices - driving closer to London and then buying a ticket. So today I parked in Guildford in a free parking area and walked to the station.

Bought a return to Waterloo (no travel card, that's £35!) and the off peak return is £27.70!

Upon further investigation, a return from Newhaven (my area) is only £6 more - what?

Is it cheaper to buy tickets "on the day" via the railforums ticketing or something like Trainline?

Literally, I've only gone for a few 455s and that's it...

 

[Watershed]

Fares on the Brighton Main Line, especially at Off-Peak times, are notably cheap. GTR (and their predecessors) have held down Off-Peak fares and even reduced prices on occasion. The same can't be said for SWR routes, where fares are generally quite a bit higher as they have effectively increased fares quite a lot when they introduced highly restrictive Evening Out and Sunday Out fares to replace Super Off-Peak ones. That said, it could be worse - GWR have increased their Thames Valley Off-Peak fares 4 times in the last year, by a total of 12-18%.

Trainline don't charge their booking fee for tickets purchased on the day via the app, but TrainSplit or other split ticket retailers may be able to find cheaper splits sometimes. Trainline offers splits too, but they have a very basic algorithm that often doesn't find the cheapest split.