audreyh1
Give me a museum and I'll fill it. (Picasso) Give me a forum ...
I buy all my long distance high speed train tickets ahead of time as you can get some pretty great deals if you book a couple of months in advance. Usually at least half full fare. Sometimes even better. I don't usually buy the non-refundable Prems which disappear very quickly, but the Flex tickets that give a good discount but are still exchangeable and mostly refundable depending on the timeline.I've always gone directly to the rail site, SNCF, TrenItalia, Renfe ES, etc.
I haven't always prepurchased online though. Some places require you to put in your credit card at the web site ahead of time before using the app.
There isn't always an advantage in prepurchasing tickets in advance. Exceptions were Dutch rail from Amsterdam to Paris and then the Eurostar from Paris to London, because those tickets, at least Eurostar, started at around $100 and went up if you purchased them last minute, like airline tickets.
Captaintrain has a nice feature where you can book a ticket including reserved seats, but not have to pay for it for 10 to 14 days depending on the type of ticket. This lets you work out a bunch of stuff before committing to the purchase.
And they issue e-tickets whenever they can which means you don't even have to print your ticket at home (although I usually print a backup) but the conductor reads the Q-code on your phone or iPad. That's what we did last year, and it worked great. In fact they didn't even check our IDs if we had the e-ticket on our personal device.
But yes, in this case I'm just figuring out alternatives for buying tickets a day or few hours ahead of time and not having to go to the ticket counter or get stuck having trouble buying (versus just printing) at a self service machine with a long line of people behind me.