Advance tickets not available to Cumbria

[neilmc]

Last week I needed to travel one way from Chesterfield to either Appleby or Penrith. I looked at the options online, for Appleby I could have got an Anytime ticket at around £40 (slow meander on the S+C), but for Penrith I was being offered a "cheap" off-peak ticket for £60.40 as opposed to £68 for an Anytime ticket.

However, if I split at Manchester for Penrith I could get an Advance to Manchester for an incredibly cheap £6.50, plus another Advance Manchester to Penrith for £16. In the end I took the Chesterfield-Manchester Advance and hung around there to get a lift with my wife.

This means that anyone wishing to do this journey without a split ticket is being ripped off as the off-peak ticket saving to Penrith is a pittance and no advances were offered to either station from Chesterfield. Whose fault is this - is it that more than one operator was required and advances tend to only be offered for journeys wholly with one train company? If so this discriminates against people from areas like Cumbria whose journeys are liable to be longer ones.

 

[exile]

Last week I needed to travel one way from Chesterfield to either Appleby or Penrith. I looked at the options online, for Appleby I could have got an Anytime ticket at around £40 (slow meander on the S+C), but for Penrith I was being offered a "cheap" off-peak ticket for £60.40 as opposed to £68 for an Anytime ticket.

However, if I split at Manchester for Penrith I could get an Advance to Manchester for an incredibly cheap £6.50, plus another Advance Manchester to Penrith for £16. In the end I took the Chesterfield-Manchester Advance and hung around there to get a lift with my wife.

This means that anyone wishing to do this journey without a split ticket is being ripped off as the off-peak ticket saving to Penrith is a pittance and no advances were offered to either station from Chesterfield. Whose fault is this - is it that more than one operator was required and advances tend to only be offered for journeys wholly with one train company? If so this discriminates against people from areas like Cumbria whose journeys are liable to be longer ones.

It's quite common for advance fares to be "one company only" - I suffer from that where I live, where I have to book a separate journey to the nearest TPE station to use their advance tickets.

 

[Tetchytyke]

Not all routes have an advance ticket, and it is purely at the discretion of the relevant TOCs whether a fare has an advance ticket or not. It's not really anybody's "fault", it is just that the TOCs haven't decided to set an advance fare.

Bizarrely the Chesterfield to Penrith fare is set by CrossCountry, even though the furthest you'd travel on an XC train is the ten miles or so from Chesterfield to Sheffield. That possibly explains why nobody has set an advance fare for that route; XC certainly aren't going to bother.

TPE do set advance fares from Sheffield to Penrith, but these are TPE Only.