Rail fares explained

[cealdis]

[WARNING: This post may make you lose any remaining faith you had in the railway network in this country]

Recently, Erethorn discovered that by breaking his tickets into two (instead of buying a ticket for the whole of journey A->C, he bought a ticket from A->B and a ticket from B->C) the price did not, as you would expect, go up but instead went

Comments

[simlo]

That's madness. It really does mean that finding the cheapest train tickets is going to involve large amounts of time doing exactly the sort of thing you've just done, doesn't it?

I've also been in a situation where advances have been available for a train journey Cheltenham-London(Paddington-King's Cross)-Cambridge, but not for the King's Cross to Cambridge leg, with the result the ticket for Osymandias to travel from Cheltenham to Cambridge than the one for me to join him for the last leg of that journey. Silliness.

[exactlyhalf]

Maybe one can save time by learning the good breakdowns for the trips one takes most frequently? I share your frustration though...

[exactlyhalf]

So do you think that it is the ability to buy more restricted tickets (day returns) for individual legs which makes this potentially cheaper? That would make a degree of sense. It would also suggest that there is not much point trying this if you can get a restricted ticket for the original journey.

Ticketing really is incomprehensible in the UK. I'm still unsure of how the basic tickets work (e.g. with reservations, compulsory reservations etc.). This makes me anxious that I've bought some invalid combination etc. and will be fined and/or have my journey wasted (since I'm usually on time critical business). I have trouble even working out which little pieces of paper are relevant when the machine gives you 15 almost identical little cards... One shouldn't need a PhD for this stuff (or a detailed introduction by a friend), it is simply some of the worst design I've ever witnessed.

[cealdis]

I think in general there's probably a lot less to be saved if you can get an off-peak day return for your entire journey. (A quick look at Oxford-Guildford means that if you break your journey into 2 by buying tickets to and from Reading, you save 10p.)

I have a nasty suspicion that one of the reasons you cannot buy a day return to Birmingham is because they wanted to streamline fares, to minimise the number of tickets available so as to cause less confusion. Obviously this hasn't really worked, and there are still a number of tricks to getting the cheapest train fare possible for your journey.

As I understand it, generally train fares fall into the following categories:
Time categoriesAnytime - this means you can use your train ticket on both peak and off-peak services. Unfortunately, the definition of peak varies depending on what journey you're doing. In general, though, it's defined as before 9.30am on weekdays. Note that, when travelling back from London on First Great Western trains (the standard ones to Paddington), peak also

[cealdis]

(Continuing, as I ran into the character limit)

Mostly I feel very privileged for having grown up using trains regularly, so that I can spout all of this from the top of my head. It is an absolutely ridiculous system and I'm not surprised that people who haven't grown up using it frequently are quite baffled. In comparison to, say, travelling in Vienna (where we used the public transport quite a lot), it's basically Mornington Crescent. Hope my explanations above clear away some of the mystery.

[exactlyhalf]

They certainly do. The funny thing is I'm sure one could make a single page info graphic which basically summarises everything. They could just pop this in a leaflet and put it in their stations...