TV’s money-saving expert Martin Lewis has been helping YOU to Beat the Crunch this month, with tips in The Bolton News every Saturday.

This week, in the last in the series, he reveals ways to bring down the cost of rail travel.

TRAIN companies are taking us for a ride. The train ticketing system in this country is a joke: two singles are often cheaper than a return, and long journeys cost less than shorter ones on the same route. So, if you’re trying to find the cheapest train ticket, you need to forget common sense and learn to beat the system.

Get early booking discounts late — Everyone knows that you can get fares more cheaply if you book early. Yet you might not realise just how late it’s still possible to get a discounted “early” fare.

Let me prove how powerful this nugget of info is. On my TV show “It Pays to Watch”, I was challenged to save money for a small business owner who spends £12,000 a year on train tickets. My biggest focus was when he booked.

For one of his regular early morning journeys from London to Sheffield, he’d typically pay £140 for a return ticket. On the show, I got him to ring up the evening before, rather than pay on the day, when he could still buy “advanced” tickets on the same train for just £64.

Split your tickets, not the journey — The big savings come from split ticketing; buying tickets for the separate parts of your journey, rather than the whole trip. You may end up with four, six or more tickets instead of two, but you’ll travel on exactly the same trains.

Split ticketing works particularly well on journeys to or from large cities, as fares on commuter routes tend to be higher. The first step should be to visit the Transport Direct (transportdirect.info) or National Rail (nationalrail.co.uk) websites to see where your train stops. Then price up the tickets for the various bits of the journey.

Only pay peak at peak times — To increase your savings, only buy peak time tickets for the part of the journey that’s during peak time. If you are starting a two hour journey at 9.30 in the morning, for 1 ½ hours you’ll be travelling off peak. Split your tickets so that you buy a peak ticket to the first station you’ll call at after ten o’clock. The rest of the journey can be at off-peak rates.

Cheap train deals — As well as the above techniques to cut any journey’s cost, often, if you know where to look, you can get some journeys for as little as £1. Many train companies run one-off travel promotions for short periods. There is a full list of vouchers and codes updated at moneysavingexpert.com/traindeals