Free Train Rides in Lockdown

[Gwiwer]

3 hours ago, corneliuslundie said:

Is any ticket machine (or App) going to offer me that?

There is a website which does.  And it is then a simple step to book the split ticketing and obtain the collection of tickets from a machine at your station of choice.  Which doesn't have to be where you begin your journey - it can be any station with a suitable machine.  

 

https://www.splittraintickets.net

[RJS1977]

Whilst a nice idea in theory, I'm not sure a flat mileage rate (even with peak/off peak bands) would work in practice, as not all journeys at a given time have the same occupancy levels. Reducing fares on busy trains could make them even more crowded, whilst increasing them on less busy trains could have the opposite effect.

 

Most cities' peak flows tend to be only in one direction (i.e. in in the morning and out in the evening). The fares on those services are often deliberately high to try to cap the number of travellers, whilst trains travelling in the opposite direction may well have a lower fare to try to attract passengers on to what may otherwise be an empty service.

 

Likewise I can remember Virgin XC used to offer cheaper fares on Saturdays for trains from Reading to Birmingham New Street via Solihull than via Birmingham International, to encourage passengers who weren't going to the NEC to take the quieter Solihull train instead (one year when I was going to Warley they accidentally released the cheap tickets on the wrong train and it caused chaos!)

[phil-b259]

15 minutes ago, Gwiwer said:

There is a website which does.  And it is then a simple step to book the split ticketing and obtain the collection of tickets from a machine at your station of choice.  Which doesn't have to be where you begin your journey - it can be any station with a suitable machine.  

 

https://www.splittraintickets.net

 

Indeed - but thats a third party site.

 

I believe that thanks to the privatisation legislation any TOC operated website must only offer end to end tickets - just as is the practice at staffed ticket offices unless you specifically enquire about split ticketing*

 

 

* Note even if the ticket clerk suggests split ticketing, given they are not being recorded then who is to say you didn't mention it to them first thus 'complying with the legislation

[Bernard Lamb]

9 hours ago, phil-b259 said:

 

Indeed - but thats a third party site.

 

I believe that thanks to the privatisation legislation any TOC operated website must only offer end to end tickets - just as is the practice at staffed ticket offices unless you specifically enquire about split ticketing*

 

 

* Note even if the ticket clerk suggests split ticketing, given they are not being recorded then who is to say you didn't mention it to them first thus 'complying with the legislation

The booking office staff always offer split ticketing on the old Midland line in Beds and Herts where bus passes allow a discount on local train travel. They automatically issue a ticket to the station nearest to the county boundary and another for the rest of the journey. Using a railcard as well as a bus pass does not phase them at all. I . never tried to book this type of journey on line. I would assume that booking on line could be possible, as it asks me if I have a rail card it could be programmed to ask me if I had a bus pass, but I have never tried to see if the on line system can do what the booking office staff can manage. 

Bernard

[caradoc]

18 hours ago, Nearholmer said:

Read my follow-up post regarding time bands.

 

I’m utterly unconvinced that competition is currently doing anything useful for anybody on the national rail network, so I’m going to be hard to convince on that score.

 

Read the part of my post which referred to dates, not time bands.

 

 

[Jim Martin]

On 28/07/2020 at 18:35, Nearholmer said:

 

I’m utterly unconvinced that competition is currently doing anything useful for anybody on the national rail network, so I’m going to be hard to convince on that score.

 

There are definitely places where competition has created choices between different levels of service at different price, to the benefit of customers. I don't know how Chiltern and LNWR compare to Avanti on London-Birmingham, but LNWR's (previously London Midland) London-Liverpool tickets were much cheaper than Avanti's and were very popular among travellers for whom cost was more important than time (and who didn't mind 3+ hours on a Class 350 and a change at Stafford)

 

Jim