northwichcat
Veteran Member
Rather oddly the Nottingham Post doesn't appear to be participating in the offer (and AFAIK never has done) even though it's owned by Reach plc and Nottingham is served by Northern (albeit only the Nottingham-Leeds service, with East Midlands Railway running most other services out of Nottingham).
There are at least two Derbyshire papers, the Buxton Advertiser and the Central Derbyshire Times, listed under National World, but I don't know if you can buy either of those in Nottingham. If not, then I guess the only way that people from Nottingham can make use of the offer would be to make a special journey to an area where you can buy participating newspapers, or ask a friend who lives in such an area to post some tokens to them.
And even if someone from Nottingham did manage to get hold of some tokens, they may find that because there are no participating papers for sale there, the ticket office staff at Nottingham may not be very familiar with the offer.
I would guess (though this is just speculation) that the Nottingham Post might have wanted to participate in the offer but EMR might have objected for fear that if the offer were promoted in any Nottingham local papers, passengers might get confused and think that they were also valid on EMR Regional services, and try to use them to get to places like Derby, Matlock, Lincoln and Skegness.
You're probably overthinking it. It's just as likely that they've reworked an old agreement that didn't include Nottingham, or that Northern opted against including Nottingham for commercial reasons. I don't think EMR can block an advert from another transport provider!