Caledonian Sleeper query

[Halsebee]

I'm thinking about traveling from Fort William to London on the Caledonian Sleeper in March. I will be travelling from London to Edinburgh a few days prior to that during the day on a normal service.
I plan to reserve a sleeper berth. My question is can I use normal return tickets for this journey and pay the sleeper berth supplement? By normal tickets I mean I am thinking of getting a super off peak return from London to Edinburgh ( or somewhere near Edinburgh that allows me to actually buy a super off-peak return!) and then a return from Edinburgh to Fort William. The secondary question is of course can I use split tickets on this service together with a sleeper supplement?

 

[Watershed]

Interavailable (e.g. Any Permitted) tickets can be used in the CS rooms with a supplement - it's even possible to buy the supplement on the CS website. But in most cases it is cheaper to buy a dedicated CS ticket, especially since LNER have single leg pricing and Avanti have 70% single pricing. This means there isn't such a huge cost penalty for mixing CS and daytime trains in each direction.

Split tickets can be used on CS but you can't split at Edinburgh when combining singles/returns, since it's a pick-up only call towards Fort William and set-down only in the reverse direction. The first/last "open" stop is Dalmuir. You could of course split at any intermediate station, regardless of whether the train stops there, if one or both tickets are a season ticket, ranger or rover.

 

[paninaro]

Does that mean that *sometimes* (however rarely) you can save money by booking a non-Sleeper ticket and then booking the room supplements? What would one have to look for to find such tickets? I guess:
- either any permitted or via something on the Sleeper route
- doesn't have time restrictions (I'm thinking of "can't arrive into London before..." type restrictions)
?

 

[Watershed]

Does that mean that *sometimes* (however rarely) you can save money by booking a non-Sleeper ticket and then booking the room supplements? What would one have to look for to find such tickets? I guess:
- either any permitted or via something on the Sleeper route
- doesn't have time restrictions (I'm thinking of "can't arrive into London before..." type restrictions)
?

It really depends on how cheap your non-Sleeper ticket is. In some situations it could be effectively "free", for example if you're taking advantage of the "midnight rule" at the end of a day's Interrail that you would be using one way or the other (e.g. if arriving off a flight or Eurostar).

Worth noting that Avanti & LNER Off-Peak time restrictions specifically allow travel on the Caledonian Sleeper.