Probably also the only case of a TOC not selling a ticket on it’s own website for one of its own services. To make matters worse they even sell Advance tickets between FTW and GLQ. Purchasing one is next to impossible (thankfully Trainsplit sells them).
A couple of corrections:
1. Merseyrail don't sell any tickets on their web site, for their own TOC or any other. They'll tell you how much their tickets cost, but you can't actually buy anything there. That's probably just as well, as their planner appears to ignore tickets they don't price themselves.
2. Caledonian Sleeper sell tickets for a wide range of services on
this page. That said, I can't see a link to this page from
their homepage, although they used to have one by where they sold tickets.
With regard to reservations, if I select to buy Glasgow-Fort William tickets on the CS site for their trains, it brings up a screen with tick boxes annotated with "reserve seats (optional)". I don't think insisting on reservations would be very practical, whatever is printed in the timetable.
On another note, NRE have two issues with selling these tickets (for instance, from
here*). The only tickets they offer for the 05:48 are an anytime return and a "Fixed Seated Ticket" (a sort of advance ticket), where you can actually buy an off peak day return or an anytime day single for this journey. And the click-through thing for Caledonian Sleeper just goes to
www.sleeper.scot.
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