Difficulty purchasing a Birmingham New St to Liverpool / Manchester 'Virgin Only" Advance.

[General Zod]

Greetings,
Ive tried on several occasions and also using different TOC websites to purchase a Birmingham New St to Liverpool Lime Street or Manchester Piccadilly Advance "Virgin Trains Only" ticket which obviously means changing at Crewe. The only option one is offered is a direct West Midlands Train ticket. Are these tickets not actually available or is there a specific route option you have to input in order to be offered the fares ?

 

[Bletchleyite]

Greetings,
Ive tried on several occasions and also using different TOC websites to purchase a Birmingham New St to Liverpool Lime Street or Manchester Piccadilly Advance "Virgin Trains Only" ticket which obviously means changing at Crewe. The only option one is offered is a direct West Midlands Train ticket. Are these tickets not actually available or is there a specific route option you have to input in order to be offered the fares ?

Use the VT site or any Trainline derivative. Once you've searched, scroll down and click the link "Results are based on end-to-end tickets for the fastest available trains. Click here to check if slower routes with cheaper tickets are available." Choose the desired VT Only Advance fare level and it will show you availability if there is any (keep working your way up the prices if it says N/A for the level you picked). Searching for tomorrow I can only find one at £28.50 so I guess these sell quickly.

 

[ForTheLoveOf]

Using the TrainsCanBeCheaper or TrainSplit sites you can force the search to use Virgin Trains services only using the Advanced options menu. Alternatively NRE has a TOC restriction option (which doesn't seem to act as an actual bar, and is very buggy, but seems to generally prefer the TOC you've entered), and you can then book an itinerary/ticket offered there on any website it links you to.

The availability of Advances is indeed quite limited for this route - I'd imagine this is down to Virgin restricting the number of Advances available for sale on shorter subsections of their trains, as Birmingham to Crewe and Crewe to Manchester (or Birmingham to Rugby and Rugby to Manchester, in extremis!) are.

The usually poor value Virgin & Connections Advances are much more reasonable, as WMT don't restrict the availability of Advances on their trains too heavily. Through CrossCountry Advances are fairly reasonably priced given the time differential.