Buy London Underground Tickets
Visitor Oyster cards are plastic smartcards you can use instead of paper tickets. Add pay as you go credit which you use when you travel. It is the cheapest way to pay for single journeys on bus, Tube, tram, DLR, London Overground, TfL Rail and most National Rail services in London.
buy london underground tickets
Travelcards are paper tickets that let you travel as often as you like on the bus, Tube, tram, DLR, London Overground, Elizabeth Line, TfL Rail, and National Rail London network zones 1-6 during its period of validity.
As you can see from the above fare structure the authorities do not want you to buy single tickets, they want you to purchase one of the three payment options, Oyster cards, Contactless payment cards or Travelcards.
The Oyster card is a permanent reusable electronic ticket which is topped up from time to time by its owner. Londoners also have their season tickets loaded onto Oyster cards as well and there are passes for one weekly and monthly durations. All can be loaded onto the one electronic Oyster card.
You can buy 7 day child Travelcards at railway stations (not Underground or Overground) with a railway ticket office. The railways will issue a railways photocard free of charge if you bring along a passport size photo of your child. You can only use this for buying tickets from the railways which in practise for visitors means Travelcards.
If you are 18 or over and enrolled with a participating education establishment registered on the TfL scheme and are resident in London while studying there is an Oyster ID card that gives a 30% discount on adult-rate Travelcards and Bus & Tram Pass season tickets.
If you prefer talking to people selling the tickets there are Oyster ticket stops. These are many of these and typically are convenience stores or news-stands that sell public transport tickets as a sideline. These outlets will have a sign in their front window.
If you have a single ticket, the barrier at your destination will not return your ticket. There is a manned side gate by the barriers. If you have a Travelcard you insert the Travelcard into the same slot as for the single tickets, the barrier will check that your Travelcard is valid for both date and zones travelled.
Bus and tram services link many of London's main terminal, and suburban rail stations and operate an extensive network of Night Bus or 24-hour services. Through single or return rail tickets are not valid for travel on London Buses, but are valid on trams if routed 'via Tramlink'.
Travelcards are zonal tickets allowing unlimited travel on London's public transport network. They can be issued for travel on any one day, seven consecutive days, or for regular commuters, any period between one month and a year. Travelcards are available for travel from stations throughout London and the home counties, the south and south east and further afield on some routes. Travelcards for seven days and longer from stations within London Zones 1-9 are only available on an Oyster or National Rail Smartcard.
If you bought your annual pass before November 2022, use your CRM ID and email address to log in. If you purchased your annual pass on Eventbrite, you are currently not able to book timed tickets in advance. More help on logging in can be found on our FAQs page.
The group rate is charged at 22 per adult ticket (our Off-Peak ticket price), plus the 10% discount when booking 10 or more. Please note, group bookings are for day tickets only and cannot be used as annual passes.
Although Oyster cards can be loaded with travel card discounts, many still prefer using a paper ticket. For example, day visitors may buy a one-day travel card without having to register or, pay the 5 charge for a card. It may be more efficient to buy this style of ticket rather than Oyster pay, for those that are visiting for the day. However, paper tickets are more easily damaged than cards and are not valid for riverboat services.
It also seems like paper tickets are being phased out and discouraged. For example, you cannot buy a paper travel card for longer than one day. Seven days and longer travel passes are only available on Oystercard.
The Oyster card was a trailblazer in leading contactless travel in central London and beyond. However, just like they made buying tickets with cash redundant, they themselves are being phased out as more travellers turn to other contactless payment methods.
Both payment methods now include capped fares, both daily and weekly. This means that either method can be a bit cheaper here, and there, but the differences are negligible. Paper tickets still exist but they continue to be discouraged. For example, you can only get a one-day paper travel card. This is in comparison to the Oyster card, which can hold weekly, monthly and annual travelcards.
You can buy London Underground tickets at all Tube stations in London. To avoid the ticket queues at Victoria Underground station, however, you may want to buy your tickets in advance at Gatwick Airport or at Victoria National Rail station.
Travelcards are available from all underground station ticket machines (there are no longer any underground tickets offices). The busier stations in central London have staff to help you use the machines.
Travelcards are also available from Oyster ticket stops. These are newsagents and local shops licensed to sell London transport tickets and Oyster cards. One Day Travelcards are not available from Oyster ticket stops.
You should never pay the full cash fare for tickets on any form of transport in London. The full cash fare means buying a single paper ticket from an underground station ticket machine, either with cash or coins or with a debit/credit card.
This pagestates that paper tickets are available. In order to look up the fares, you can use the fare calculator. For example,this linkcomputes the cost for a one-way trip from Paddington Station to Heathrow. Note that three prices are given: A peak price, an off-peak price, and a cash price. The latter is what you are looking for.
Alternatively, a visitor plastic Oyster card costs 7 and you can order it online before to arrive before you leave home (although you can also get them at underground stations when you arrive).
If you are planning to travel regularly on weekdays during peak times, our new Season Ticket Calculator will help you find the best value ticket for your journey. Simply enter your journey details and it will search for the best value ticket. Tickets you can buy include Weekly, Monthly, Custom and Annual Season tickets, plus Anytime Day Returns.
There may be minimum fares and time restrictions on tickets bought with a Railcard or other discount card. You should check the terms & conditions of your Railcard or discount card to see if they apply to you.
However, you can buy discounted rail tickets for a journey which involves a cross London journey using the Underground to travel between two London mainline train stations. Anytime Day Travelcards are also available when bought as part of your National Rail ticket to London from outside London Zones 1-9, subject to a minimum fare of 20.30.
You can log in to your account to view your tickets. Please be ready to show your e-tickets on arrival. If possible, please avoid printing your tickets. We will ask for you to scan your own tickets using our self-service scanners so make sure that your brightness is turned up on your mobile phone screen. Our staff will be on hand to help.
You cannot buy Network Railcard discounted tickets for journeys wholly on the London Underground and Docklands Light Railway. However discounted tickets bought for cross-London rail journeys which involve travel on the London Underground are permitted.
If you are not able to book that far in advance, you could expect to pay up to 25 for an Express Class single (one-way ticket) or 37 for an Express Class return (round-trip). Business First Class tickets can cost up to 32 for a single or 55 for a return. The price will vary based on how far in advance you book.
For Frequent travelers: Buy Carnet tickets here, where you can get 6 for the price of 5 or 12 for the price of 9. These are all single journey tickets and are valid in either direction.
Passengers travelling on the London underground tubes currently have no means of knowing their whereabouts between stations. The challenge for providing such service is that the London underground tunnels have no GPS, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, or any kind of terrestrial signals to leverage. This paper presents a novel yet practical idea to track passengers in realtime using the smartphone accelerometer and a training database of the entire London underground network. Our rationales are that London tubes are self-driving transports with predictable accelerations, decelerations, and travelling time and that they always travel on the same fixed rail lines between stations with distinctive bumps and vibrations, which permit us to generate an accelerometer map of the tubes' movements on each line. Given the passenger's accelerometer data, we identify in realtime what line they are travelling on and what station they depart from, using a pattern-matching algorithm, with an accuracy of up to about 90% when the sampling length is equivalent to at least 3 station stops. We incorporate Principal Component Analysis to perform inertial tracking of passengers' positions along the line when trains break away from scheduled movements during rush hours. Our proposal was painstakingly assessed on the entire London underground, covering approximately 940 km of travelling distance, spanning across 381 stations on 11 different lines.
Zurich, Switzerland, Dec.18, 2009 - ABB, the leading power and automation technology group, has won a $70 million order from Transport for London, the body responsible for the city's public transport, to build a new bulk supply point substation to power the London underground rail system.
The Edgware Road substation is part of a plan to upgrade power supply to the underground's railway lines and support the introduction of new rolling stock. ABB's part of the project is due to be completed in 2012. 041b061a72