16–25 Railcard
British Rail Discount Card
The 16–25 Railcard is an annual card giving discounts on certain types of railway ticket in Britain. It is available to anybody aged between 16 and 25 (inclusive), and certain mature students aged 26 and above, and is currently priced at £35.00 (as of March 2025). There is no restriction on the number of times the Railcard can be used to purchase discounted tickets during the period of its validity, and there are no geographical restrictions on its use.
Introduced in 1974 on an experimental basis, under the name Student Card, and expanded into the Student Railcard later that year, it was the first of the many Railcards which formed part of British Rail's array of concessionary fare schemes, and which still exist on the post-privatisation railway network. Later, it was rebranded as the Young Persons Railcard and, from 18 May 2008, the 16–25 Railcard.
History
In the 1960s and 1970s, many new universities were opened in Britain, while car ownership was relatively low, especially among young people. Furthermore, internal flights were not as cheap or prevalent as they are now. Most students either hitched or took a long-distance coach. The National Union of Students (NUS) had a very large travel company at the time with charter flights all over the world. They wanted to expand their operations domestically and so went to various regional sales managers of British Railways to develop special fares for holders of NUS cards.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “16–25 Railcard” is british Rail Discount Card. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Railcard, British and Rail, not as a finished interpretation.
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This entry incorporates text from “16–25 Railcard” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.