Do you have a reference to route charges in the USA?
UK PPLs are trained to call up everybody and read out War and Peace. It makes for a lot of work and is pointless.
With most of my flying life in the US, I tried keeping it brief when I moved (giving just what you give in the US, which is who you are, where you are, what you're doing and what you want) but {London|Scottish} Information would always then ask me more questions making it more or less impossible to be brief. I have discovered that I can usually get away with just the above plus where I came from and having no more questions, especially your route is obviously going to be pretty much direct from where you are to where you're going. (I'm guessing they must generate some kind of flight strip for you - I'm not sure why they care where you came from otherwise). This seems reasonably concise.
As for not actually bothering with basic service, it's an option I sometimes take when over land, but since every cross country flight I do requires a medium to long overwater flight I like someone to know when I'm coasting out or coasting in.
Flying towards North Wales I think I hit the same problem the original poster did - there seems to be a bit of a radio dead area around the north Welsh coast and around the hilly parts, but on the return trip I did manage to stay in contact until they turned me over to Ronaldsway approach.
What does puzzle me about what I've seen of the UK training environment, there seems to be disproportionate attention paid to R/T when it's arguably the least important bit of flying (everyone knows the mantra 'aviate, navigate, communicate in that order'). So much so for the BGA bronze for example the pass mark for the R/T portion of the written test is higher than it is for the aviating and navigating bits! In the US they don't even do a written test for R/T.
