Oxford - Bromsgrove via Birmingham New Street

[Stargull]

I was a bit surprised recently when using the National Rail planner for a journey from Oxford to Bromsgrove. The planner returns routes via Worcester, unless I force it to go via BNS. Going via Birmingham saves half an hour, but requires two separate tickets.

Why is this not a valid route? I assume it's because the distance is shorter via Worcester, even if the time isn't.

 

[jfollows]

The routing guide allows map LH only, see http://data.atoc.org/routeing-maps, which doesn't include your "via Birmingham" route.

(Of course there's more to the routing guide than the mapped routes, but in this case I can't think that any of the other routing rules apply, there are no through train services and via Birmingham is going to be a significantly longer route as you say.)

I used to travel Oxford-Macclesfield in the early 1980s and I would normally go via Worcester out of preference - even then the trains on the direct Oxford-Birmingham services were overcrowded. This was well before the "routing guide" and I know it'd not be a valid route today, but at the time it was fine.

 

[kieron]

The other side to this is the fact that Oxford-Bromsgrove tickets are quite a bit cheaper than Oxford-Barnt Green or Banbury-Bromsgrove ones (either of which is valid via Birmingham). I suppose they could create "via Birmingham" tickets for Oxford-Bromsgrove, but they'd also be more expensive.

There are through tickets now which are valid for an Oxford-Birmingham-Bromsgrove journey (so you can start or finish short of the origin or destination on the ticket), but it would be cheaper to split somewhere.