UK Train/Tube Fare Map

[greatkingrat]

I think the intended route for the North Wembley - Rugeley Town ticket is via Watford Junction, not doubling back into Euston.

 

[_toommm_]

Works incredibly well with my Samsung S8 on Chrome. Map is a little slow to load but that is expected with so much data having to be processed (this is by no means a criticism - take it as a compliment as it's much snappier than I expected).

Works superb on my MacBook too, again on Chrome. One question though - with the inevitable price changes and various offers being added or removed fairly often, how do you process those? Do you have to update it manually or is it done over the cloud?

 

[Gathursty]

I applaud the OP on unintentionally answering my question posed on https://www.railforums.co.uk/threads/£10-anytime-day-return-limit-report-2018.169838/#post-3642805 for everyone on this forum by making a map showing limits that amounts of money could take you from a specific station. Whilst I did specify an anytime ticket, this website comes incredibly close to what I wanted and the general public would be fascinated to see. Well done!

 

[kieron]

I think the intended route for the North Wembley - Rugeley Town ticket is via Watford Junction, not doubling back into Euston.

Either way, I don't think you can actually comply with the terms of that ticket.

The £15 fare is a "WMR & LNR only" one, and I haven't found anything to suggest you can use another operator.
It has a LG restriction, which forbids break of journey.
North Wembley only has platforms on the DC line, so is not served by WMR or LNR trains.

LNR do serve Wembley Central, but a ticket from there costs £1 extra, so a switch would probably throw the figures out.

I have noticed a couple of things where I can't quite see what's going on.

There are quite a few situations where it lists a split it finds twice with exactly the same details for each. For example, Frodsham-Mouldsworth and Frodsham-Gobowen show this effect, but Frodsham-Winsford and Frodsham-Shrewsbury don't.

And if I select a "peak" fare from Frodsham to Flint, it gives a £12.50 split, cheaper than the £13.10 through SDS fare. If I select "off peak", it only shows the SDS.

I do like this web page as a way to get an impression of what is available. Flexible single fares are a nonsense in most of the rail network, so I wouldn't take the specific results as showing anything.

For one thing, I hadn't realised that there were no fares between Frodsham and Hag Fold until I visited the site.

 

[drspa44]

ATOC update the data every 6 months, at which point, I will probably check if any stations should be added or removed. The fact it is currently 4 months out of date may be why the impossible 'WMR & LNR ONLY' fares exist. I do wonder what would happen if you showed up to North Wembley with that ticket though, assuming, as you say, that the TOCs do not operate there.

The updating process will involve me:
1. downloading the data in raw, clustered format from data.atoc.org.
2. running a program to convert that into a non-clustered format and calculate peak and off-peak split tickets. A CPU-bound task which takes 30 minutes on an i7-2600.
3. a bit of local sanity checking.
4. uploading all of the files overnight to Google Cloud Storage. Each file is about 6 MB * 2874 stations = 17 GB.

All my program sees with Rugeley Town is the North Wembley ticket is £15 and the Euston one is £16. I do take your point that the sensible option would be to walk from KGX to Euston. I did try to hack in some £0 fares where stations were less than 500m away from each other, however this had the amusing effect where some split tickets had you hopping between a chain of nearby stations in central London to avoid a zone 1 tube fare. For example, Charing Cross -> Embankment -> ... -> Euston. It is not simple to avoid this without making the algorithm much slower.

If anyone has a list of OSIs in a machine readable format, that would be very useful and it would solve the walking problem. I suppose there will be one set for TfL and one for everything else?

The Frodsham-Gobowen example is a difficult-to-explain bug that occurs when the cheapest off-peak split ticket uses peak time tickets. I will try to fix it in the next release.

Also, another question. I had a complaint that the website offered a split ticket via Norton Bridge, but this has been closed for a while. I can see that fares are definitely still offered ( http://www.brfares.com/#expert?orig=SAC&dest=NTB ), but they all involve a bus. Would it be worth just removing it? Are there other stations like this?

 

[ForTheLoveOf]

ATOC update the data every 6 months, at which point, I will probably check if any stations should be added or removed. The fact it is currently 4 months out of date may be why the impossible 'WMR & LNR ONLY' fares exist. I do wonder what would happen if you showed up to North Wembley with that ticket though, assuming, as you say, that the TOCs do not operate there.

The updating process will involve me:
1. downloading the data in raw, clustered format from data.atoc.org.
2. running a program to convert that into a non-clustered format and calculate peak and off-peak split tickets. A CPU-bound task which takes 30 minutes on an i7-2600.
3. a bit of local sanity checking.
4. uploading all of the files overnight to Google Cloud Storage. Each file is about 6 MB * 2874 stations = 17 GB.

All my program sees with Rugeley Town is the North Wembley ticket is £15 and the Euston one is £16. I do take your point that the sensible option would be to walk from KGX to Euston. I did try to hack in some £0 fares where stations were less than 500m away from each other, however this had the amusing effect where some split tickets had you hopping between a chain of nearby stations in central London to avoid a zone 1 tube fare. For example, Charing Cross -> Embankment -> ... -> Euston. It is not simple to avoid this without making the algorithm much slower.

If anyone has a list of OSIs in a machine readable format, that would be very useful and it would solve the walking problem. I suppose there will be one set for TfL and one for everything else?

The Frodsham-Gobowen example is a difficult-to-explain bug that occurs when the cheapest off-peak split ticket uses peak time tickets. I will try to fix it in the next release.

Also, another question. I had a complaint that the website offered a split ticket via Norton Bridge, but this has been closed for a while. I can see that fares are definitely still offered ( http://www.brfares.com/#expert?orig=SAC&dest=NTB ), but they all involve a bus. Would it be worth just removing it? Are there other stations like this?

If the tickets are still in the fares database I think it's fair game to offer them up. Norton Bridge station may notionally have closed but the replacement bus service which has replaced the rail service for the last decade and a half is still going strong, and it is still possible to buy tickets to and from there (though obviously they cannot be bought or collected at the station!).

 

[Tw99]

Very interesting, and many thanks for doing the work on this... I did find a couple of things that I hope you can explain:

I tried looking up a fare for Pangbourne to Bickley. The Split option comes up with this:

Pangbourne (PAN) Maidenhead (MAI) SDS ANYTIME DAY S
ANY PERMITTED £8.70 25.7 km £0.34/km
Maidenhead (MAI) Bickley (BKL) SDS ANYTIME DAY S
EALING COMMON OR WEST ACTON (UND) £11.20 54.8 km £0.20/km

I can't find that latter fare on brfares.com, which I'd always thought was a comprehensive source.

In fact even for a direct journey, the site suggests
SDS ANYTIME DAY S
£29.10
ANY PERMITTED

which brfares.com says is £32.10.

 

[Paul Kelly]

EALING COMMON OR WEST ACTON (UND) £11.20 54.8 km £0.20/km

I can't find that latter fare on brfares.com, which I'd always thought was a comprehensive source.

It seems to be an Anytime Single from Maidenhead to ZONE U345* LONDN. Definitely not valid to Bickley which is a National Rail station.

 

[Paul Kelly]

In fact even for a direct journey, the site suggests
SDS ANYTIME DAY S
£29.10
ANY PERMITTED

That seems to be an Anytime Single from Pangbourne to ZONE U1245 LONDN, again, definitely not valid to Bickley.

The best realistic splitting option for this journey using Anytime singles only, and which involves a very slow journey avoiding London, changing at Reading, Clapham Junction and Peckham Rye, seems to me to be to split at Tilehurst and Feltham, for a total price of £21.20.

 

[Tw99]

It seems to be an Anytime Single from Maidenhead to ZONE U345* LONDN. Definitely not valid to Bickley which is a National Rail station.

Ah, OK. So it looks like there's a bug in the site's fare selection logic then - seems that it needs to take into account that those fares "to ZONE Unnn" aren't valid (normally? ever?) to NR stations.

 

[hawk1911]

If the tickets are still in the fares database I think it's fair game to offer them up. Norton Bridge station may notionally have closed but the replacement bus service which has replaced the rail service for the last decade and a half is still going strong, and it is still possible to buy tickets to and from there (though obviously they cannot be bought or collected at the station!).

Norton Bridge has, and still does, offer some interesting fare saving opportunities. But not for much longer.

@drspa44 thanks for this, I'm sure it will help me find a few more fare saving options.

 

[Joe Paxton]

Ah, OK. So it looks like there's a bug in the site's fare selection logic then - seems that it needs to take into account that those fares "to ZONE Unnn" fares aren't valid (normally? ever?) to NR stations.

Only where there is ticketing interavailability between LU and NR, e.g. Kings Cross / Moorgate to Finsbury Park, Liverpool Street to Stratford, the Thameslink central core, on Chiltern Railways between Marylebone and the Met line stations etc.

Otherwise no. Unfortunately the TfL fares booklets which used to detail such ticketing interavailability are no longer published, and neither NRE nor any of the TOCs publicise it either.

 

[mattdickinson]

ATOC update the data every 6 months, at which point, I will probably check if any stations should be added or removed. The fact it is currently 4 months out of date may be why the impossible 'WMR & LNR ONLY' fares exist. I do wonder what would happen if you showed up to North Wembley with that ticket though, assuming, as you say, that the TOCs do not operate there.

The updating process will involve me:
1. downloading the data in raw, clustered format from data.atoc.org.
2. running a program to convert that into a non-clustered format and calculate peak and off-peak split tickets. A CPU-bound task which takes 30 minutes on an i7-2600.
3. a bit of local sanity checking.
4. uploading all of the files overnight to Google Cloud Storage. Each file is about 6 MB * 2874 stations = 17 GB.

All my program sees with Rugeley Town is the North Wembley ticket is £15 and the Euston one is £16. I do take your point that the sensible option would be to walk from KGX to Euston. I did try to hack in some £0 fares where stations were less than 500m away from each other, however this had the amusing effect where some split tickets had you hopping between a chain of nearby stations in central London to avoid a zone 1 tube fare. For example, Charing Cross -> Embankment -> ... -> Euston. It is not simple to avoid this without making the algorithm much slower.

If anyone has a list of OSIs in a machine readable format, that would be very useful and it would solve the walking problem. I suppose there will be one set for TfL and one for everything else?

The Frodsham-Gobowen example is a difficult-to-explain bug that occurs when the cheapest off-peak split ticket uses peak time tickets. I will try to fix it in the next release.

Also, another question. I had a complaint that the website offered a split ticket via Norton Bridge, but this has been closed for a while. I can see that fares are definitely still offered ( http://www.brfares.com/#expert?orig=SAC&dest=NTB ), but they all involve a bus. Would it be worth just removing it? Are there other stations like this?

Route 00042 was originally Central/Silverlink Only, and then it was London Midland Only, so it hasn't been valid to stations on the DC line other than Harrow & Wealdstone and Wembley Central for many years.

 

[mattdickinson]

All my program sees with Rugeley Town is the North Wembley ticket is £15 and the Euston one is £16. I do take your point that the sensible option would be to walk from KGX to Euston. I did try to hack in some £0 fares where stations were less than 500m away from each other, however this had the amusing effect where some split tickets had you hopping between a chain of nearby stations in central London to avoid a zone 1 tube fare. For example, Charing Cross -> Embankment -> ... -> Euston. It is not simple to avoid this without making the algorithm much slower.

If anyone has a list of OSIs in a machine readable format, that would be very useful and it would solve the walking problem. I suppose there will be one set for TfL and one for everything else?

A list of machine readable OSIs is available at https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/out_of_station_interchange_usage#incoming-1220485

 

[drspa44]

Regarding ZONE U345* LONDN like tickets being incorrectly offered for rail stations, I think I have a 99% accurate fix which will be a lot better than what is currently there.

If I restrict these tickets to where the station name ends with any of DLR, UND, UNDERGD, LT or LRT, I get the best results. I will still exclude North Greenwich NGR, however I think this is the only one and it does not appear on brfares.com anyway. Doing it this way means Farringdon has very few results - only Thameslink services I think, which is unfortunate. I also find a number of DLR stations do not appear in the ATOC data at all like London City Airport and King George V, so I'm not sure how people are supposed to get there without splitting. If I really need to, I can add a special case for farringdon and north greenwich.

The alternative is if I restrict these to where the CRS begins with Z. This will mean Southfields SFS and a few others are excluded.
It will also mean Canada Water and Whitechapel are included when they should not be.

Thanks for the OSIs!

 

[cuccir]

Mrs Cuccir, who normally only smiles with indulgence when I mention anything train or map realted, was very impressed by this and wanted to pass on her congratulations on such a useful site and well-designed interface.

 

[some bloke]

If anyone has a list of OSIs in a machine readable format, that would be very useful and it would solve the walking problem. I suppose there will be one set for TfL and one for everything else?

For National Rail in London and more widely, these may be of interest.

This lists some interchanges between stations under "Other useful transfer times":
http://www.nationalrail.co.uk/times_fares/ticket_types/46562.aspx

Some are listed on the Station Interchange Maps page:
http://www.nationalrail.co.uk/stations_destinations/46646.aspx

 

[bussnapperwm]

Great site, only thing I have noticed with split ticketing sites is that sometimes when returning same day for some trips, a Day Ranger / PTE could be cheaper.

Example is a journey from say Stourbridge to Leamington is usually cheaper if travelling after 0930 on a Daytripper Plus (TfWM product)

 

[drspa44]

Having said the above, there do seem to be a small number of journeys where the map isn't showing appropriate fares. This is mostly because it is only implementing some fare overrides. Fare overrides are complex but essentially most fares are priced in clusters - i.e. from one collection of stations to another collection of stations. The longer the distance, the bigger the cluster typically.

However sometimes big clusters can result in a situation where journeys from one extreme of the cluster to the other are priced unreasonably high or low. Therefore TOCs can set individual fares for specific station combinations within those clusters. An example of where this occurs is Stoke-on-Trent to Newark North Gate - here it suggests using Blythe Bridge to Fiskerton; however, it incorrectly uses the cluster price for this (£11.00 single), instead of the override fare of £16.30 which is then suddenly much less attractive.

I don't suppose you, or anyone else, knows where in the ATOC data I might find this override. I had a look at the NFO file (NON DERIVABLE FARE OVERRIDES), however I only see an override for Groupsave Kids:
R1282635100000 GSKO311229992005201829092016N0009990000000100B3YNN

 

[ForTheLoveOf]

I don't suppose you, or anyone else, knows where in the ATOC data I might find this override. I had a look at the NFO file (NON DERIVABLE FARE OVERRIDES), however I only see an override for Groupsave Kids:
R1282635100000 GSKO311229992005201829092016N0009990000000100B3YNN

I'm afraid I'm not familiar enough with the fares data to be able to tell you. @SickyNicky may be able to help you (or alternatively we have data fares workshops which may illuminate the matter, and be of a general interest anyway).

 

[alistairlees]

I don't suppose you, or anyone else, knows where in the ATOC data I might find this override. I had a look at the NFO file (NON DERIVABLE FARE OVERRIDES), however I only see an override for Groupsave Kids:
R1282635100000 GSKO311229992005201829092016N0009990000000100B3YNN

You're looking in the wrong place. This example that ForTheLoveOf gives is nothing to do with NFO. You just need to have a rule that says that if a fare from A to B has both a cluster fare and a specific fare (I haven't expressed that very well) then you need to use the specific fare, whether it's higher or lower.

York to Selby is a much easier flow to see this in action:
http://www.brfares.com/#expert?orig=YRK&dest=SBY

Every ticket type in the cluster to cluster flow is overridden - not just those that are matched by ones in the point to point flow.

 

[drspa44]

You're looking in the wrong place. This example that ForTheLoveOf gives is nothing to do with NFO. You just need to have a rule that says that if a fare from A to B has both a cluster fare and a specific fare (I haven't expressed that very well) then you need to use the specific fare, whether it's higher or lower.

York to Selby is a much easier flow to see this in action:
http://www.brfares.com/#expert?orig=YRK&dest=SBY

Every ticket type in the cluster to cluster flow is overridden - not just those that are matched by ones in the point to point flow.

Thanks - that makes sense, although I fear this will be a difficult change to make in my code.

With regards to OSIs, I have experimented a bit with different options and I have realised that there is not much point in using an official list. Kings Cross and Euston are about 0.5 miles apart and would generally be considered an acceptable OSI. However Earls Court and Gloucester Road are the same distance apart, but TFL would not consider it an OSI because they share the same line. If walking up to 1 km is allowed in a split ticket journey, then it should be allowed to avoid London zone 1 by travelling to EC then walking to GR. It has opened up a few interesting options and although it makes for some quirky routes, I think I'm going to keep it.

 

[drspa44]

Not that it is very practical, but if I increase the walking threshold to 20 km, you get some very nice patterns...

 

[drspa44]

I have just pushed another set of data with the following improvements:

• Fixes for ZONE U#### LONDN fares. Specifically they should, in general, not apply to rail-only stations. For example, http://www.brfares.com/#expert?orig=CRY&dest=NWD .
• Some LU stations like Leicester Square had CRS codes inconsistent with ATOC's data, meaning zonal fares were not being shown. Where possible, these were fixed.
  
• 'Walk' fares have been added, up to 1 km, which makes for more creative split ticketing. The split tickets from Euston almost exclusively involve walking to Mornington Crescent to avoid zone 1 . It also opens up a lot more opportunities for travelling to/from Gatwick and interchanging at the Croydon stations.
• I am now overriding fares correctly I think, with examples like http://www.brfares.com/#expert?orig=YRK&dest=SBY and http://www.brfares.com/#expert?orig=BYB&dest=FSK. ATOC code is now 3x slower and 20% uglier .
• UI bugfix - anytime fares should always be shown amongst the off-peak display, especially as sometimes the off-peak is more expensive.
• UI bugfix - off peak split tickets were previously not showing if they were identical to the anytime split tickets.

 

[krus_aragon]

If I may suggest a feature for future implementation, the ability to exclude operator-specific tickets would be helpful.

Virgin offer a number of Virgin-only point-to-point tickets along the North Wales Coast, and onward to a few other locations such as Manchester and Stockport. The fact that Virgin only operate eight trains each way along this line (and half of those go east before 10am!) means that I'm unlikely to want to use those tickets in a split-ticketing scenario, but as they're a lower price your algorithm consistently includes them. (Selecting a station not served by Virgin, such as Glan Conwy or Deganwy, doesn't get around it as I'm often offered a ticket to Llandudno Jn followed by a Virgin Only ticket.)

Other than that, I can only add to the above praise for your work.

 

[drspa44]

If I may suggest a feature for future implementation, the ability to exclude operator-specific tickets would be helpful.

Virgin offer a number of Virgin-only point-to-point tickets along the North Wales Coast, and onward to a few other locations such as Manchester and Stockport. The fact that Virgin only operate eight trains each way along this line (and half of those go east before 10am!) means that I'm unlikely to want to use those tickets in a split-ticketing scenario, but as they're a lower price your algorithm consistently includes them. (Selecting a station not served by Virgin, such as Glan Conwy or Deganwy, doesn't get around it as I'm often offered a ticket to Llandudno Jn followed by a Virgin Only ticket.)

Other than that, I can only add to the above praise for your work.

It would be difficult to do this because the grunt work of working out the split tickets is done as a batch job with a single file for each station as the result. If you want to DM me a few North Wales stations I can hack in a small change to exclude Virgin west coast fares and upload the results to my test account.

 

[mlt11]

I'd also like to add praise to the OP for this extraordinary site, most impressive work, although to agree with his opening post as to the usefulness of the site.

Only those with a lot of time of time on their hands would follow some of the journeys it churns out and/or it would be cheaper with an advance ticket and/or cheaper getting returns from 'conventional' split ticket sites. A real pity it's unable to calculate return fares which would be incredibly beneficial.

 

[drspa44]

I'd also like to add praise to the OP for this extraordinary site, most impressive work, although to agree with his opening post as to the usefulness of the site.

Only those with a lot of time of time on their hands would follow some of the journeys it churns out and/or it would be cheaper with an advance ticket and/or cheaper getting returns from 'conventional' split ticket sites. A real pity it's unable to calculate return fares which would be incredibly beneficial.

I might implement return and advance fares at some point in the future, but I will need to think of a way to separate these from everything else.

I thought if any community would be happy to make a convoluted journey via seldom-used train stations, it would be railforums . Besides, if the journey is quite short, it can be quite useful. For example, travelling between the home counties and London. Or navigating the inconsistencies of non-zonal Oyster fares. The Oyster-based Split Ticket from Gatwick Airport (GTW) to Cheshunt (CHN) is about half the nromal Oyster fare and a third the SDS fare.

 

[MikeWh]

The Oyster-based Split Ticket from Gatwick Airport (GTW) to Cheshunt (CHN) is about half the nromal Oyster fare and a third the SDS fare.

There is however a problem with it. The first part is a Thameslink only fare to Croydon Stations. You can't get to West Croydon using Thameslink unless you intend allighting at East Croydon and walking to West Croydon for the start of the next leg.

 

[drspa44]

There is however a problem with it. The first part is a Thameslink only fare to Croydon Stations. You can't get to West Croydon using Thameslink unless you intend allighting at East Croydon and walking to West Croydon for the start of the next leg.

Yes, this is what my router was suggesting. I guess the walk might be too long for most, although it is shorter than some OSIs.

There are still some interesting examples that don't require this walk. Gatwick to Hertford East is £20.40 or £12.80 splitting at East Croydon and Southbury. I struggle to find any Oyster fare to Gatwick that is not cheaper if splitting at East Croydon or somewhere around there in zone 6, like Purley. I imagine the fares within zone 2-6 are subsidised a lot more than those beyond.

There are also quite a few where there is no 'avoiding zone 1' option because the journey time would be too long. None of these are too severe and it looks like some were fixed in January. A simple example, which I think isn't too burdensome is Feltham to High Barnet. £5.50 / £8.00 direct or £3.90 / £5.80 if splitting at Richmond, and you would be changing there anyway. Strangely, Citymapper reports the price incorrectly as £2.90 off peak. https://citymapper.com/trip/Ttaebg3s1ue