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Southeastern High Speed on Weekends?

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Class377

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I'm 99.9% certain that the High Speed line requires separate tickets from the main network (i.e. TravelCards aren't valid). Yet, when I used NRE to plan a journey from St Albans (SAC) to West Ham (WEH) on Saturday, I was routed via St Pancras to Stratford on the High Speed line, and my ticket price/type was quoted as a standard weekend travelcard.

Confused isn't the word; I know that my ticket wouldn't be valid, or would I be allowed to board claiming that NRE told me this route?
 
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hairyhandedfool

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'Inboundary' Travelcards are not valid on HS1 services. I have never seen mention of 'Outboundary' Travelcards like the one from St Albans.
 

Class377

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Placing it in as from SAC to WEH (leaving 31/3/12 at 09:00 and returning at 17:15 with a 16-25 railcard) throws it up. £7.90 is the standard Super-off-peak travelcard price for anywhere in London and the route it suggests is as follows:

St Albans-St Pancras Int. (FCC, 22 minutes)
St Pancras Int.-Stratford Int. (SE HS, 6 minutes)
Stratford Int.-West Ham (DLR, 17 minutes)

@hairyhandedfool, thanks for the help but could you please explain inboundary and outboundary for me please? Never heard the phrases before!
 

Brucey

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I see it now. The FCC website also offers this ticket as being valid.

Inboundary means a ticket bought solely for use within the London Fare Zones. An outboundary Travelcard includes a return journey from a station outside the London Fare Zones (e.g. St Albans).
 

Mike395

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Hmmmm, issue with thetrainline's booking system there. Travelcards are not valid on Southeastern High Speed services. :)

If you had the itinerary with you, you might be OK, but I'd say it's unlikely, as you'd have to convince both gateline staff and the guard too.
 

MarkyMarkD

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It's not showing me that now. (Well not on thetrainline.com itself).

Strange that NRE does show something which is evidently not a valid route using a Travelcard.
 
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yorkie

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I'm 99.9% certain that the High Speed line requires separate tickets from the main network
Not true. It's a normal route. Unfortunately the policies of the DfT and SETs infamously anti-customer pricing manager (who does not like people to use his shiny new trains!;)) have caused confusion, leading some people to believe it is not part of National Rail ticketing.

(i.e. TravelCards aren't valid)
This is true, the HS1 route is considered to be entirely 'outside' the zones despite the St Pancras-Stratford Int section being geographically inside. As a result, the trains are lightly loaded, and I always see more staff than passengers at Stratford Int (when I am passing through the area to the DLR platforms).

However out-boundary Travelcards are available.

Yet, when I used NRE to plan a journey from St Albans (SAC) to West Ham (WEH) on Saturday, I was routed via St Pancras to Stratford on the High Speed line, and my ticket price/type was quoted as a standard weekend travelcard.

Confused isn't the word; I know that my ticket wouldn't be valid, or would I be allowed to board claiming that NRE told me this route?
It should not be offering that, however if the ticket was purchased then a contract is formed. The TOCs must honour that contract...
If you had the itinerary with you, you might be OK, but I'd say it's unlikely, as you'd have to convince both gateline staff and the guard too.
...the correct action would be to do a 'TIR', this involves either taking a copy of, or withdrawing, the original ticket and issuing a free of charge replacement Travelcard and ticket back to St Albans enabling the customer to complete their journey. SET can then chase up payment from the ticket issuer (e.g. Thetrainline).

It would be totally incorrect for SET to charge the customer an additional fare, if an itinerary was provided. Such an itinerary could be produced by logging on to the website on a mobile device, however I'd much favour a printout.

A potential problem I could see is that if the customer did not have an itinerary with them and it was their word for it, I could see SET trying to charge the customer and putting the onus on the customer to claim back from the issuer.
 

Clip

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This is true, the HS1 route is considered to be entirely 'outside' the zones despite the St Pancras-Stratford Int section being geographically inside. As a result, the trains are lightly loaded, and I always see more staff than passengers at Stratford Int (when I am passing through the area to the DLR platforms).

.

Platforms always have a few people on them - going both into and out of London. Theres nothing to wait for upstairs really.

Its also very busy in the peaks for the DLR access to Canary wharf.

Must have been about 25 people got off today when I used it from Kent, just gone 3
 

yorkie

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Platforms always have a few people on them - going both into and out of London. Theres nothing to wait for upstairs really.
Only time I used HS1 there were very few passengers going between Stratford & London. Don't see many people using Intl but I suspect those I do see are going to/from Kent rather than to/from London.
Its also very busy in the peaks for the DLR access to Canary wharf.
Which will surely be people going from the East to Stratford. And a lot of those people have ridiculously huge wages, there isn't going to be such demand from such well-off people outside the peaks or at weekends, yet the prices are still daft.
Must have been about 25 people got off today when I used it from Kent, just gone 3
Yes, but that wouldn't be covered by a (in-boundary) Travelcard. It's still poor, and not as well used as it should be from Kent, but when you look at travel between London St Pancras and Stratford, it must be a tiny percentage of the potential due to the ludicrous premium on that section of the journey.
 

MarkyMarkD

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Not true. It's a normal route. Unfortunately the policies of the DfT and SETs infamously anti-customer pricing manager (who does not like people to use his shiny new trains!;)) have caused confusion, leading some people to believe it is not part of National Rail ticketing.
Well, not quite. It's a normal route for all journeys not priced by SET. But for every journey priced by SET, other than cross-London journeys, it's a premium-priced route which requires a "+HS1" ticket.

...the correct action would be to do a 'TIR', this involves either taking a copy of, or withdrawing, the original ticket and issuing a free of charge replacement Travelcard and ticket back to St Albans enabling the customer to complete their journey. SET can then chase up payment from the ticket issuer (e.g. Thetrainline).

It would be totally incorrect for SET to charge the customer an additional fare, if an itinerary was provided. Such an itinerary could be produced by logging on to the website on a mobile device, however I'd much favour a printout.

A potential problem I could see is that if the customer did not have an itinerary with them and it was their word for it, I could see SET trying to charge the customer and putting the onus on the customer to claim back from the issuer.
What's the betting that SET would ask for a new fare?

If the OP met my favourite gateline staff member at SFA they wouldn't get out of the station, itinerary or no itinerary!
--- old post above --- --- new post below ---
It's still poor, and not as well used as it should be from Kent, but when you look at travel between London St Pancras and Stratford, it must be a tiny percentage of the potential due to the ludicrous premium on that section of the journey.
£8.60 SDR SRA-London Terminals, £9.80 SDR SFA-London Terminals.

Not such a ludicrous premium! And no premium, if you happen to be coming from EUS/KGX/STP and it saves you a tube fare.

The ludicrous premium is on the Gravesend (GRV)-London Terminals section - SDR not HS1 is £21.80, whilst SDR +HS1 is £29.40 - a premium of £7.60 which is ludicrously more than the premium from Faversham (FAV) which is far, far, further away from London (£48.30 vs £41.50 i.e. a premium of £6.80).
 
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yorkie

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Well, not quite. It's a normal route for all journeys not priced by SET. But for every journey priced by SET, other than cross-London journeys, it's a premium-priced route which requires a "+HS1" ticket.
That routeing has caused a lot of confusion; they should rename them "Any Permitted" as anywhere else.

There can be a premium on some local journeys to travel via Darlington for example, but rather than have "Plus ECML" the cheaper fares are "Not Darlington" and the fares with the premium are "Any Permitted".

HS1 should be no different and all the flows that are called "Plus High Speed" should be re-named "Any Permitted" ASAP.

If the OP met my favourite gateline staff member at SFA they wouldn't get out of the station, itinerary or no itinerary!
SET would have quite some explaining to do, and quite some compensation to provide in that case!
Not such a ludicrous premium! And no premium, if you happen to be coming from EUS/KGX/STP and it saves you a tube fare.

But the true fare is £2.10 PAYG Off Peak or £3.00 Peak, using Oyster PAYG.

True, if someone really insists on using cash then there isn't much of a premium, but the vast majority of people would be using a Travelcard (in which case the premium is effectively infinity) or Oyster PAYG.


The ludicrous premium is on the Gravesend (GRV)-London Terminals section - SDR not HS1 is £21.80, whilst SDR +HS1 is £29.40 - a premium of £7.60 which is ludicrously more than the premium from Faversham (FAV) which is far, far, further away from London (£48.30 vs £41.50 i.e. a premium of £6.80).
Yes that is utterly ludicrous and I hope people boycott such fares.
 

MarkyMarkD

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Surely participating in Oyster is optional? SET don't want to fill up their long-distance higher-speed trains with lots of very short-distance passengers.

HS1 can be quite full in the rush hours, although I've never seen it actually full & standing.

I am sure that a reasonable proportion of those using it are on longer-distance tickets where there is no premium, but there is also a significant tendency among business people (my colleagues included) to use it simply because they can.

SET were very clever, in charging it as a standard class premium, rather than as first class, as it therefore gets around many companies' travel policies which prevent the use of first class.

Arguably it is just a single (first, but with no drinks (payable or free!)) class train. And - amusingly - if SET had declared it as such, they would have avoided the train being half full of "freeloaders" (their perception, not mine!) with through-London standard class tickets.
 

All Line Rover

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Only time I used HS1 there were very few passengers going between Stratford & London. Don't see many people using Intl but I suspect those I do see are going to/from Kent rather than to/from London.

Which will surely be people going from the East to Stratford. And a lot of those people have ridiculously huge wages, there isn't going to be such demand from such well-off people outside the peaks or at weekends, yet the prices are still daft.

Yes, but that wouldn't be covered by a (in-boundary) Travelcard. It's still poor, and not as well used as it should be from Kent, but when you look at travel between London St Pancras and Stratford, it must be a tiny percentage of the potential due to the ludicrous premium on that section of the journey.

I agree with this. The platforms at Stratford International (for the trains to London St Pancras) are empty during the Off-Peak. Why pay almost £6 for a 6-minute journey when the tube costs less than half that?

I suspect Stratford International is mostly used by reasonably well-off people in Kent who want to do some shopping at Westfield, or by commuters in Kent who are required to change at Stratford International for the DLR. I don't think the prices for these sorts of markets are that bad - £32 for an Off-Peak return from Canterbury to Stratford (£21.10 with a Network Railcard), or £136.60 for a 7-day season (£27.32 a day) - little more than petrol and parking would cost.

It is interesting to note, though, that the above travellers are only required to pay 5p extra each way to travel to London St Pancras, which shows how overpriced the London St Pancras <> Stratford International tickets are.
--- old post above --- --- new post below ---
Surely participating in Oyster is optional? SET don't want to fill up their long-distance higher-speed trains with lots of very short-distance passengers.

HS1 can be quite full in the rush hours, although I've never seen it actually full & standing.

I am sure that a reasonable proportion of those using it are on longer-distance tickets where there is no premium, but there is also a significant tendency among business people (my colleagues included) to use it simply because they can.

SET were very clever, in charging it as a standard class premium, rather than as first class, as it therefore gets around many companies' travel policies which prevent the use of first class.

Arguably it is just a single (first, but with no drinks (payable or free!)) class train. And - amusingly - if SET had declared it as such, they would have avoided the train being half full of "freeloaders" (their perception, not mine!) with through-London standard class tickets.

It is a premium service that deserves a premium price, and it has benefited a lot of people, especially those living in Ashford, Canterbury, and nearby places.

However, it has done little to benefit those living along the North Kent Coast, whose HS1 journey times are nothing spectacular, and whose local services have slowed down dramatically. To make HS1 "First Class Only" with ridiculously high fares would have caused outrage.
--- old post above --- --- new post below ---
The ludicrous premium is on the Gravesend (GRV)-London Terminals section - SDR not HS1 is £21.80, whilst SDR +HS1 is £29.40 - a premium of £7.60 which is ludicrously more than the premium from Faversham (FAV) which is far, far, further away from London (£48.30 vs £41.50 i.e. a premium of £6.80).

You can travel from Basingstoke to Waterloo for a similar price! :lol:
 
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Bungle73

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What they really need to do with the north Kent route is cut out a few stations to speed the journey up. Why they have to stop at every single station in Medway I have no idea.
 

MarkyMarkD

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Because a lot of passengers travel from the Medway towns, and because the HS1 supplements are roughly the same however far you travel! So they make as much money out of an HS1 customer from (say) Strood as they do from (say) Faversham, compared to them catching a slower service.

Very few people would pay the HS1 supplement if they had to change - it rather defeats the point of sitting in a nice comfortable train.

There are a few (evening peak) trains which don't stop absolutely everywhere - e.g. missing Strood - but I think they all stop at every other Medway town.
 

Clip

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Because a lot of passengers travel from the Medway towns, and because the HS1 supplements are roughly the same however far you travel! So they make as much money out of an HS1 customer from (say) Strood as they do from (say) Faversham, compared to them catching a slower service.

Very few people would pay the HS1 supplement if they had to change - it rather defeats the point of sitting in a nice comfortable train.

There are a few (evening peak) trains which don't stop absolutely everywhere - e.g. missing Strood - but I think they all stop at every other Medway town.

It doesnt have to stop at all the stations though. It follows a stopper anyway so there is no need for it to stop at all 4 stations. It should be Sittingbourne Rochester Strood Gravesend. Even in the morning peaks they start some at Rochester too so its a bit of an overkill.
--- old post above --- --- new post below ---
I agree with this. The platforms at Stratford International (for the trains to London St Pancras) are empty during the Off-Peak. Why pay almost £6 for a 6-minute journey when the tube costs less than half that?

I do the journey quite a few times a month off peak and theres always about 5 or 6 people there waiting to go back to london.
 

MarkyMarkD

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It doesnt have to stop at all the stations though. It follows a stopper anyway so there is no need for it to stop at all 4 stations. It should be Sittingbourne Rochester Strood Gravesend. Even in the morning peaks they start some at Rochester too so its a bit of an overkill.
I am sure that most "normal" passengers prefer not to change.

I appreciate that for those travelling a longer distance, the time saved by not stopping might be useful. But, as you say, for much of the route the HS1 trains are interleaved with stoppers so not stopping wouldn't necessarily save any time.
 

TheJRB

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The ludicrous premium is on the Gravesend (GRV)-London Terminals section - SDR not HS1 is £21.80, whilst SDR +HS1 is £29.40 - a premium of £7.60 which is ludicrously more than the premium from Faversham (FAV) which is far, far, further away from London (£48.30 vs £41.50 i.e. a premium of £6.80).
Another incredible premium is of course an Ashford International-London Terminals SDR at a whole £9.80 (Not Valid on HS1: £49.30; Plus High Speed: £59.10). Then again, even off peak there's a £5.10 (make that £9.90 compared to Super Off Peak) premium (Not Valid on HS1: £25.50; Super Off Peak Not Valid on HS1: £20.70; Plus High Speed: £30.60).

HS1 can be quite full in the rush hours, although I've never seen it actually full & standing.
I've used the 09:43 from Ashford (the first off peak) quite a few times and it's always relatively busy with most, if not all, seats occupied.

It is a premium service that deserves a premium price, and it has benefited a lot of people, especially those living in Ashford, Canterbury, and nearby places.
Has it really done a lot for Ashford? Looking back at the 2009 timetable, it was possible to get on the 12:03 from Ashford and be at Waterloo East in 59 minutes and Charing Cross in 1 hour 3 minutes. So it's taken 21 minutes off all in all which on its own sound great. But St Pancras isn't in as good a location for some people and the Charing Cross (and Maidstone East line) journey times have been drastically increased to make HS1 look better and make it more popular. That's not to say that it hasn't been a real benefit to a lot of people and I do personally really appreciate HS1, but I just don't think it's quite as much an improvement as Southeastern would like us to believe.
 

MarkyMarkD

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Your last point is definitely true.

At peak times I can travel from Chatham to St Pancras in 36 minutes, or from Chatham to Cannon Street (non-stop) in 48 minutes.

The 48 minutes could be faster if it wasn't for pathing issues leading to slow running and stopping in places for signals.

Cannon Street is more useful for most commuters than St Pancras and well worth the 12 minutes extra travelling time - and the cheaper travel cost!
 

Failed Unit

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It is a premium service that deserves a premium price,

I would dispute that statement, premium maybe compared to the classic lines but not compared to other IC operators such as Great Western, Virgin, East Coast and EMT.

On the ECML (and probably others) you have always had cheaper tickets for using the NSE service and the IC service but not as great as we have on HS1.

There are other operators that have premium services, you don't pay less money for using a 317 between Cambridge and London on a slow service than you do for a 365?

The above is a probably a bad example, but as others have commented once HS1 was introduced other services were significantly slowed down to make it more attractive forcing people onto HS1.

I am a big winner of the service and I don't pay the tax travelling from Scotland to Kent, I now no longer need to cross London to get Victoria. But some of the time I have saved is now lost walking back to Canterbury East which is where the bus stations is closest to! As others have said a for a lot of people the real speed increase has not happened as they need to get from St Pancras.
 

jon0844

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The service is hardly comparable to an Intercity service, where you might expect to pay a bit more. No first class, no buffet and lots of stops.

I hope that one day they'll drop the premium, but doubt it will be anytime soon. Easy money!
 

Failed Unit

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The service is hardly comparable to an Intercity service, where you might expect to pay a bit more. No first class, no buffet and lots of stops.

I hope that one day they'll drop the premium, but doubt it will be anytime soon. Easy money!

I guess te precidence is set, should HS2 come along we get the debate is it worth spending x on the premium between Leeds / Manchester when it has only saved us Y in time. The have slowed down the classic route to 2h30 to force us onto HS2 etc, etc, etc.
 

OwlMan

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I guess te precidence is set, should HS2 come along we get the debate is it worth spending x on the premium between Leeds / Manchester when it has only saved us Y in time. The have slowed down the classic route to 2h30 to force us onto HS2 etc, etc, etc.

Just like now when you have a choice of a via Hebden Bridge ticket or an Any Permitted icket.:)
 
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