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Does any journey planner correctly allow travel on Underground interavailable routes?

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alistairlees

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There are a number of Underground routes where National Rail tickets are valid without the need for a zonal fare or a cross-London marker.

For instance, a Peterborough to London Terminals ticket is valid to Kings Cross, Moorgate, Old Street and St Pancras. And it is also valid on the Underground from Kings Cross / St Pancras Underground to Moorgate.

There are details at https://www.railforums.co.uk/thread...ection-7-integrated-fares.70022/#post-1315636.

My question is, does any journey planner correctly only offer a London Terminals ticket for a journey from (for example) Peterborough to Moorgate? Or any other example where interavailability should be available.

For instance, I can only get the Thameslink journey planner to give me a Peterborough to London Zone U1 ticket, even if I specify "via London Kings Cross", for a journey from Peterborough to Moorgate. (Additionally, it returns a daft route after Kings Cross that is a walk to St Pancras; Thameslink to Farringdon; and tube to Moorgate - this is because there is no tube link from Kings Cross to Moorgate.)

This is a question about journey planners and compliance. Not about whether this interavailbility should exist, should be changed, should be better understood by TfL staff, should work on magstripe tickets etc. - there are probably threads for all those things.

The reasons I'm asking are:
- should journey planners get this correct?
- how come journey planners are selling Zone U1 tickets when they should not be (according to the rules)?

I suspect the answers are all to do with poor data (well, none really) to support this.

Still, back to the original question: is any journey planner doing this properly? Am I missing one that is? I tried National Rail, Thameslink, GWR. Only Trainline seems to get it more or less right, selling a York to London Terminals ticket via Kings Cross and the tube to Highbury & Islington to Moorgate. But you have to select "via London Kings Cross" to get that, and there's no need to go via HHY (though that might be quicker because of the data).
 
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alistairlees

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I'm going to cheekily bump this as I would have thought that many members of the forum would be outraged by mis-selling of interavailable fares on many (almost all?) websites. Or are forum members not bothered?
 

Haywain

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I think it is entirely safe to say that no booking engine can cope with interavailable routes - I'm slightly surprised that you managed to get the York to Moorgate journey to give an answer. I guess that, apart from anything else, RSP/RDG have never bothered to make this part of the accreditation requirements. Which is quite surprising really, considering how arcane some of the requirements might look!
 

Hadders

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Webtis does for a Stratford - Liverpool Street journey on a Sunday morning.

EDIT - not just Sundays, it does it on weekdays too.

upload_2018-10-10_21-0-46.png
 

Paul Kelly

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Peterborough to Moorgate is a bad example, because there is no TUBE fixed link from King's Cross to Moorgate in the timetable data, so no journey planner will be able to show it correctly.

In this case I think Trainline has got it wrong - in my opinion a fare to London Terminals is not valid to get to Moorgate via King's Cross and Highbury & Islington, because when you get to HHY you have left the London Terminals fares group and it's not valid to re-enter it again when you get to Old Street.

I think a U-zone fare, e.g. Peterborough to ZONE U1* LONDON, is the only valid one for a journey via this route - it's obviously valid on the Underground from KGX to HHY, and then valid to continue on the interavailable route from HHY to MOG via Essex Road and Old Street (N.B. this interavailability is documented in the PDF file "NR & LU interavailability.pdf" at the bottom of the link in the OP).

Try https://trainscanbecheaper.info/ - the FastJP journey planner generally gets this stuff right. As TrainsCanBeCheaper is forcing me to log in I can't show you a screenshot, but try something like Broxbourne to Stratford, or Kidderminster to Barking.
 

Paul Kelly

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I think it is entirely safe to say that no booking engine can cope with interavailable routes
Not true - IPTIS (used by National Rail Enquiries and GoVia sites, e.g. Thameslink, and some others) has reasonably good interavailability support, but it falls down a bit for journeys not involving Zone 1. FastJP (used by TrainsCanBeCheaper.info etc.) also supports interavailability outside Zone 1.
 

alistairlees

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Webtis does for a Stratford - Liverpool Street journey on a Sunday morning.

EDIT - not just Sundays, it does it on weekdays too.

View attachment 53611
That webTIS implementation is completely incorrect regarding the times of tube trains though. It simply lists a tube train every minute before the first National Rail train. Are there really tube trains every minute at 04.13, 04.14, 04.15, 04.16 etc.? I think not - webTIS is simply making this up. A poor implementation indeed; it's obviously not using any actual data from TfL.

It does show the difficulty of trying to use rail only data on a route that is (as well as having a train service) also has a fixed link.

I was using GWR.com, but I'll assume it's the same on all Worldline-powered sites.
 

alistairlees

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Peterborough to Moorgate is a bad example, because there is no TUBE fixed link from King's Cross to Moorgate in the timetable data, so no journey planner will be able to show it correctly.

There is a fixed link from KGX to STP though ("walk" for 1 minute) and one from STP to MOG ("tube"), so the two could be strung together. It would incur an interchange penalty at STP though, greatly exaggerating the actual journey time.
 

Haywain

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On TrainSplit, which looks to be the very same thing, attempts at getting journeys from Luton Airport Parkway to Elephant & Castle, and to London Bridge, avoiding City Thameslink should produce journeys using London Underground without requiring a Zone U1 (or U1+ other zones) ticket but it fails to do so. A number of similar journeys are also handled in the way one would expect without interavailability.

Maybe I'm not as wrong as I suggested.
 

Paul Kelly

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On TrainSplit, which looks to be the very same thing, attempts at getting journeys from Luton Airport Parkway to Elephant & Castle, and to London Bridge, avoiding City Thameslink should produce journeys using London Underground without requiring a Zone U1 (or U1+ other zones) ticket but it fails to do so.
At which station are you envisaging the interchange from National Rail to Underground? My understanding is that the interavailability only applies if you change to the Underground at either West Hampstead or Kentish Town, but neither Underground station features in the fixed links in the timetable data, so journey planners can't show this route.

Unless you are saying that a fare from Luton Airport Parkway to London Thameslink should be valid to interchange to the Underground at King's Cross St Pancras and travel to London Bridge or Elephant & Castle on Underground from there? Is that really valid?
 

Paul Kelly

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I can't get either of those to do an interavailable journey / fare.
See attached for Broxbourne to Stratford showing a Zone U34 fare - valid on this route as Tottenham Hale to Stratford is interavailable in terms of allowing U-zone fares on the National Rail service.
bxb-sra.png

For the other way round, try South Ruislip to Gerrards Cross, where a National Rail fare is valid on the Underground from South Ruislip to West Ruislip (also attached).
sru-ger.png
 

alistairlees

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At which station are you envisaging the interchange from National Rail to Underground? My understanding is that the interavailability only applies if you change to the Underground at either West Hampstead or Kentish Town, but neither Underground station features in the fixed links in the timetable data, so journey planners can't show this route.

Unless you are saying that a fare from Luton Airport Parkway to London Thameslink should be valid to interchange to the Underground at King's Cross St Pancras and travel to London Bridge or Elephant & Castle on Underground from there? Is that really valid?
This TfL doc suggests that Thameslink tickets are valid to interchange anywhere on the route; but Terminals tickets are only valid to interchange at Kentish Town.
 
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