Rail pass or individual ticket?

Unless you're traveling long distances on consecutive days, which I don't recommend, you're probably better off donating your money to a worthy nonprofit rather than investing it in a rail pass.

Ouch.

To find out whether I'm wrong, get a pencil and paper.

Write down the dates of your train travel and look up the costs online. You can do this easily enough using, for example, the National Rail site (for England and Scotland).

Add up the costs of those days of train travel.

Then compare those costs with the cost of a rail pass from, for example, BritRail (again, for England and Scotland).

If your getaway looks at all like mine, the rail pass is about four times the cost of ordering your own train tickets.

A rail pass makes more sense if you're too spontaneous to order tickets in advance, because showing up at the train station and buying a ticket is the easiest way to spend double the "advance" price.

But that's still half the cost of a rail pass. See where this is going?

Do your homework to decide which is the best choice for you. With online ticket-ordering so easy, you'll probably save considerable amounts of money by getting tickets instead of getting a rail pass.

But if flexibility is more important to you than anything else, and you're willing to pay 50 to 75 percent more, then by all means, get the rail pass.