The other effect that the TOC Only fares have is that the £2.30 TfW Only single is a reprive from the ludicrous overpriced singles compared to day returns, which is often useful for me because period returns aren't on offer, so singles have far more use case than one might think.
True, though with single-leg pricing this would be solved.
The other spanner in the works on this kind of thing is Advances, which really are utterly pointless on short distance flows like this when people
really don't want to be fixed to a given train and discounts if you buy one on the spot are paltry, so all they really do is confuse. Really, it's a pity the "counted places" thing was brought in - without it, it restricted train-specific Advances (rather than &connections bits) to trains which allowed seat reservations, which pretty much restricted it to those longer-distance trains where this sort of thing has a proper use-case.
