Intermodal
Established Member
Any good guide on how this works or is it generally private?
Private unfourtunately.
TOCs can't even see what each other gets, although it is probably easy to guess on some flows.
ORCATS (Operational Research Computerised Allocation of Tickets to Services), is a large centralised legacy computer system used in the UK. It is used for real time reservation and revenue sharing on interavailable tickets between Train Operating Companies (TOCs). The system is used to divide ticket revenue when a ticket or journey involves trains operated by multiple TOCs. The system was owned by British Rail, and is now managed by the Association of Train Operating Companies.
Well, I was just wondering how it is calculated. For example if there is an Off Peak return at £30, and three TOCs can be used each way, would each TOC get £10, or is it done based on who's "turf" it is, or based on service frequency, or what? How do open access operators come into it?
There is no way to know what the formula is, so no way to know how much each TOC would get. All we can go on is little snippets of information that have been revealed. But if TOCs don't like what the formula produces, they can appeal.Well, I was just wondering how it is calculated. For example if there is an Off Peak return at £30, and three TOCs can be used each way, would each TOC get £10, or is it done based on who's "turf" it is, or based on service frequency, or what? How do open access operators come into it?
119. The majority of rail tickets are ‘inter-available’ which means that they are valid for use
on the trains of more than one operator. For example, on the Leicester to Leeds route,
passengers might choose to travel on any combination of services provided by three
different operators.226 There is no record of the passenger’s actual choice of service
operator, so unless a very restrictive fare was chosen, there is no way of knowing which
operator actually carried the passenger. As a consequence, a central industry model,
ORCATS*, is used to compute the allocation of fare box receipts to the different operators
on a route. To do this, assumptions are made about the most likely choices of passengers. It
is assumed, for example, that passengers are more likely to choose a faster, more frequent
service than a slower, less frequent one if their ticket allows.228 This system is vital in
facilitating passenger choice, but it also potentially enables a new operator on a route to
extract revenue from existing operators, thereby significantly altering the financial
circumstances of the franchise.
* The Operational Research Computerised Allocation of Tickets to Services system which is used to divide up ticket
revenue between passenger rail operators.
Appendix 1 Overview of the ORCATS Allocation Process
This section gives an outline of the Central Allocations File (CAF), which is used in producing the interchange figures, and the ORCATS process which is used to create the CAF.
Most of the train tickets that are sold are inter-available the customer has a choice of routes and operators. For example, when a customer buys a ticket to travel from Leicester to Leeds, that customer may travel on various combinations of East Midlands Trains, East Coast, CrossCountry Trains and Northern, and may interchange at Doncaster, Sheffield, Derby or Nottingham. LENNON captures the sale of the ticket, but unless the ticket has stringent route restrictions, the route actually taken by the customer is not recorded.
The route taken by any particular customer may never be known, but some route options are more attractive than others. The customer is more likely to choose a faster, more frequent service than a slower, less frequent one. This likelihood can be translated into the proportions of customers choosing each route option, on a particular flow. (A flow represents all journeys from a given origin station to a given destination station, irrespective of the route taken.) The revenue received from all customers on that flow should be split between different operators to reflect the proportion of customers which each operator carried. ORCATS was developed to model the choice made by the customers, and to allow revenue to be split between operators. It applies passenger choice modelling to the train timetable, to determine the relative attractiveness of different route alternatives. It then weights the results by journey mileage.
For any given timetable, ORCATS works out the possible routes between each origin and destination, and calculates the percentage of the passengers that are expected to choose each route based on the services in that timetable. The output from ORCATS is the Central Allocations File (CAF). This lists the proportion of journeys on each flow (or origin-destination pair) estimated to be made by each route alternative. For journeys involving interchanges, each leg of the journey is listed. By combining this information with LENNON data, which contains actual ticket sales figures for all flows, the number of interchanges occurring at individual stations has been estimated.