# I asked an agent to buy a train ticket to Edinburgh, and the one site that worked couldn't hand it over (slim)

> Vlad Cealicu sent an AI agent to buy a train ticket from London King's Cross to Edinburgh. LNER asked it to press and hold to prove it's human, Omio, Rail Europe and TrainPal put up bot checks, Trainline's robots.txt asks robots to stay off its results, and National Rail found the trains but failed to pass it to the seller. There's no rail API for agents in our directory.

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- Index: https://www.anchorterminal.com/llms.txt · API: https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/index.json · MCP: https://www.anchorterminal.com/mcp · Updated: 2026-10-26
- Licence: CC BY 4.0, credit Anchor Terminal and link this page (https://www.anchorterminal.com/terms/#data)

By Vlad Cealicu, 26 October 2026. 815 words, about 4 min to read.

On Saturday 17 October I asked an agent to buy one adult ticket from London King's Cross to Edinburgh, leaving after 9am on Friday 30 October.

This is the third errand in the series, after [my flight](/blog/personal-agents-sell-errands-they-cant-run) and [a table for dinner](/blog/i-asked-an-agent-to-book-dinner-in-london).

- 7: sites tried
- 1: let the agent search
- 0: reached a page asking for a passenger's name

One adult, King's Cross to Edinburgh, Friday 30 October after 9am, tried on 17 October 2026. Source [1].

## How far did it get?

National Rail Enquiries worked.

LNER, the company running the train, answered with a 403 and "Press & Hold to confirm you are a human (and not a bot)." Omio sent Cloudflare's "Verify you are human" check, and Rail Europe a 403 saying "Access is temporarily restricted" [[1]](#ref-1).

Trainline's search form worked, and its calendar showed US$48 for the day, in dollars because it took our server for an American visitor.

Buying a ticket from London to Edinburgh through the open web

1. **National Rail Enquiries** (searched). Ten trains, Standard from £72.90 and First Class from £119.20 [[1]](#ref-1)
2. **Hand-off to LNER** (broke). "Unable to pass you to the retailer - please try searching again" [[1]](#ref-1)
3. **LNER, Omio and Rail Europe** (bot check). "Press & Hold to confirm you are a human", "Verify you are human" and "Access is temporarily restricted" [[1]](#ref-1)
4. **TrainPal** (bot check). A slider puzzle on the results page [[1]](#ref-1)
5. **Trainline and Google Search** (kept out). robots.txt disallows the pages with results [[1]](#ref-1)

The page that worked was heavy too.

- 302,666: characters of HTML
- 5,210: characters a person reads
- 8.1MB: over the wire for the search, with a Booking.com page it opened

National Rail's results, 17 October 2026. Source [1].

## Is there a door built for agents?

No.

The fares exist as data, since National Rail can show ten trains with prices in a few seconds.

## How the test was run

On Saturday 17 October 2026, between 09:44 and 09:57 UTC, an agent drove a headless Chromium browser from a cloud server one step at a time, with the same setup as [the dinner test](/blog/i-asked-an-agent-to-book-dinner-in-london#test).

---

More in [Agent errands](https://www.anchorterminal.com/blog/agent-errands/index.md) · Previous errand [I asked an agent to book dinner in London, and one site in nine let it look for a table](https://www.anchorterminal.com/blog/i-asked-an-agent-to-book-dinner-in-london.md)

- Older: [Can you run Kimi K3 locally? Not on a desk, and Moonshot never said you could](https://www.anchorterminal.com/blog/run-kimi-k3-locally.md)
- All posts: https://www.anchorterminal.com/blog/index.md

## References

Read on 17 October 2026.

[1] Anchor Terminal, our train test, 17 October 2026, described above.

[2] Anchor Terminal, the directory, 17 October 2026. Source for there being no rail booking tool for agents among our listings, and for HERE's transit routing.