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[alistairlees]

Heathrow Express is accredited. It’s also journey-based, underneath.

 

[OscarH]

Because if your TIS is journey-planner-based (and Trainline's is) you can't buy a fare on its own

That does seem like a particularly cursed work-around

 

[Gaelan]

I suspect I know the answer, but are there any accredited web TIS (excluding the Heathrow Express one, which I'd assume still has to be accredited despite only selling HEx tickets) that aren't journey planner based?

GWR's Mixing Deck comes close, having you select a ticket then showing you the service it's valid on; but ultimately I don't think it lets you book without a journey planned.

 

[Adam Williams]

That does seem like a particularly cursed work-around

Aren't most things in this industry cursed?

Standard Premium tickets are standard class, railcards are season tickets sold from "Trainline" to "Trainline", sleeper beds are (sometimes) seats, HEX only operates one service a day, "counted place" seats exist in imaginary coaches attached to east coast trains. It's all a bunch of bodges stacked on top of other bodges.

 

[Gaelan]

Standard Premium tickets are standard class, railcards are season tickets sold from "Trainline" to "Trainline", sleeper beds are (sometimes) seats, HEX only operates one service a day, "counted place" seats exist in imaginary coaches attached to east coast trains. It's all a bunch of bodges stacked on top of other bodges.

Dear god, I've spent my fair share of time with industry data and barely knew any of these.

 

[sheff1]

GWR's Mixing Deck comes close, having you select a ticket then showing you the service it's valid on; but ultimately I don't think it lets you book without a journey planned.

It does let you book. TPE does as well,which is why I use those sites when buying non-Advance tickets online. Can't be doing with having to select specific trains needlessly.

 

[Farigiraf]

Earlier posted it in another thread- a journey from Preston to Headbolt Lane has a 12379 minute wait at Wigan, assuming this is a glitch because tickets are now available but the first service doesn't go for about a week or so. Probably better to put a 'no tickets found' screen

 

[MrJeeves]

View attachment 143387 Earlier posted it in another thread- a journey from Preston to Headbolt Lane has a 12379 minute wait at Wigan, assuming this is a glitch because tickets are now available but the first service doesn't go for about a week or so. Probably better to put a 'no tickets found' screen

Thanks for bringing this up.

Long term, we'll probably need to introduce some maximum permitted wait time before we don't offer the itinerary anymore.

 

[Farigiraf]

Today seems to be the day of glitch discovery, I've found something again!
I searched for trains from Hessle to Barton-on-Humber for noon Sep 25, and it showed me a journey which involves me going one stop to Hull, walking to the bus station, waiting 45 minutes, then taking a bus. One-way, £48.10. Hessle to Hull is about £5 at worst and the bus cannot possibly be £43. Why is it trying to sell me this/why is it so expensive? Surely Hessle-Doncaster-Habrough-Barton is a valid journey?

Trainline and other websites (I also checked Thameslink and Northern) are suggesting the same route for £46.30.
Edit: Northern is calling it an EMR bustitution, but why would EMR run bus replacements to Hull, for 45 pounds?

 

[yorkie]

Today seems to be the day of glitch discovery, I've found something again!
I searched for trains from Hessle to Barton-on-Humber for noon Sep 25, and it showed me a journey which involves me going one stop to Hull, walking to the bus station, waiting 45 minutes, then taking a bus. One-way, £48.10. Hessle to Hull is about £5 at worst and the bus cannot possibly be £43. Why is it trying to sell me this/why is it so expensive? Surely Hessle-Doncaster-Habrough-Barton is a valid journey?

Trainline and other websites (I also checked Thameslink and Northern) are suggesting the same route for £46.30.
Edit: Northern is calling it an EMR bustitution, but why would EMR run bus replacements to Hull, for 45 pounds?

View attachment 143390View attachment 143393

Believe it or not, this is actually the fare from Hull to Barton:

Look up fares for any train journey in Britain

Full details of all British rail Single, Return & Season tickets and Travelcards. Built-in Season Ticket Calculator.

www.brfares.com

That is, of course, insane but that is under the control of Northern

However, it does raise two questions
1) Why aren't we finding journeys via Doncaster (for which we could offer a cheaper fare) and
2) Why are we not selling the through fare from Hessle to Barton (which is the same price as Hull to Barton)

The answer to 1) looks likely to be the following negative easement (yes that's an oxymoron; blame RDG):

• Easement 700241 (published by TOC TP)
  Customers travelling from or via Barton On Humber to Hessle, Ferriby, Brough and beyond may not travel via Hull. This easement applies in both directions

That said, when buses are involved, the bus leg should be stripped out of the calculation for permitted routes, leaving us with just Hessle to Hull, for which the distance travelled is the shortest route, and therefore arguably the negative easement cannot be deemed to apply.

I'll get this looked into, but if we are to have a truly sensible price for this journey, it needs Northern to amend the fare.

.... Northern is calling it an EMR bustitution, but why would EMR run bus replacements to Hull, for 45 pounds?

It's actually a regular service bus; all such buses need to be attribiuted to a train operator, and in this case it's down as EMR. Yes that makes no sense, but this is what the data says, so we have to go by that!

There should really be a simple add-on (for presumably 2 pounds) on tickets to Hull, for the bus to Barton, but it needs the relevant fare setters to do that.

As for going via Doncaster, it's surely quicker to walk across the bridge but if you want to go that way, for the timebeing use advanced mode and enter Doncaster as a via point, which unlocks the cheaper fares:

 

[Farigiraf]

Believe it or not, this is actually the fare from Hull to Barton:

Look up fares for any train journey in Britain

Full details of all British rail Single, Return & Season tickets and Travelcards. Built-in Season Ticket Calculator.

www.brfares.com

View attachment 143396
That is, of course, insane but that is under the control of Northern

However, it does raise two questions
1) Why aren't we finding journeys via Doncaster (for which we could offer a cheaper fare) and
2) Why are we not selling the through fare from Hessle to Barton (which is the same price as Hull to Barton)

The answer to 1) looks likely to be the following negative easement (yes that's an oxymoron; blame RDG):

That said, when buses are involved, the bus leg should be stripped out of the calculation for permitted routes, leaving us with just Hessle to Hull, for which the distance travelled is the shortest route, and therefore arguably the negative easement cannot be deemed to apply.

I'll get this looked into, but if we are to have a truly sensible price for this journey, it needs Northern to amend the fare.


It's actually a regular service bus; all such buses need to be attribiuted to a train operator, and in this case it's down as EMR. Yes that makes no sense, but this is what the data says, so we have to go by that!

There should really be a simple add-on (for presumably 2 pounds) on tickets to Hull, for the bus to Barton, but it needs the relevant fare setters to do that.

As for going via Doncaster, it's surely quicker to walk across the bridge but if you want to go that way, for the timebeing use advanced mode and enter Doncaster as a via point, which unlocks the cheaper fares:

Thanks a lot, there's probably a crazy rabbit hole of weird TOC rules I'll have to figure out someday.
It's sneaky of them to charge that much for it though, I wonder how many people get caught out by this, when the walk-up fare for the bus is £4.50.
I wouldn't be surprised to see this in some advert infested HullLive Reach article

Beware all tourists in the Humberside, Trainline is out for blood!

About the £2 extra for the bus to Barton for Hull tickets (can't find a quote option), what would be good is to extend Hull Plusbus to Barton and Barrow(upon-Humber).

 

[yorkie]

I wouldn't be surprised to see this in some advert infested HullLive Reach article

Beware all tourists in the Humberside, Trainline is out for blood!

Yes, the standards of local journalism are so bad these days they would indeed blame the wrong organisation for this.

About the £2 extra for the bus to Barton for Hull tickets (can't find a quote option), what would be good is to extend Hull Plusbus to Barton and Barrow(upon-Humber).

Unlikely to happen; we're talking about the UK here, and that would encourage people to use public transport too much. This isn't Switzerland!

Anyway I suggest we leave it there as there isn't much more we can do, but I will aim to post an update once we have enabled the routeing via Doncaster.

 

[smsm1]

It might be the case with a couple of promotional fares, but excluding ScotRail-set Super Off-Peak Day Returns, this mostly shouldn’t be a problem.

There is also kids for a quid offer on Scotrail which can only be bought from station or on train staff. Means we are making more use of our two together Railcard however annoying that we need multiple Railcards as adds complexity or permutations of ticket combinations to try to get the cheapest fare.

Would be handy if I could just throw the 2 Railcards and passengers and types and the system to tell me. Though I sometimes just use the family Railcard as the saving for the child is minimal with the £1 offer, so easier for some journeys to just buy the tickets together.

 

[Miken]

Hello, Having seen a few times that it's possible to select a seat using this site, I've just tried it out. Booked a 1st Advance (Senior Railcard) from Euston to Wigan on Friday 13th Oct departing at 19:30. Got to checkout stage then followed the advice to put the journey into the basket. I was then able to bring up the Trainsplit seat selector, which showed me the booking made (J15) and the remainder of seats 'available' for coach J. I clicked on J38 (my preferred seat) and a message then came up saying I couldn't book this seat as I had a Standard ticket and needed a 1st class one! So I'm stuck, it would make my journey much more bearable to select my seat but I can't see how to do this or is it a glitch/bug? I'd appreciate any advice/thoughts. Many thanks...

 

[ainsworth74]

So I'm stuck, it would make my journey much more bearable to select my seat but I can't see how to do this or is it a glitch/bug? I'd appreciate any advice/thoughts. Many thanks...

I believe, though there are others more versed in this than me, that the seat selector is quite glitchy due to the backend industry systems. It's why it is still available but is somewhat hidden away as the functionality just isn't very good at the moment so Trainsplit don't want to promote it too much as that will just lead, as you've discovered, to disapointment when it doesn't work. Especially as there's nothing that can be done about it on the Trainsplit end but of course it's Trainsplit that's left looking bad!

 

[Egg Centric]

Struggling to get the site to generate me itinerary from Durham to Watford Junction not via London and fully first class (so presumably Cross Country to Birmingham then Avanti in other words) for Sunday. What options should I pick to do that?

 

[MrJeeves]

Struggling to get the site to generate me itinerary from Durham to Watford Junction not via London and fully first class (so presumably Cross Country to Birmingham then Avanti in other words) for Sunday. What options should I pick to do that?

I can get this working by choosing Durham to Watford Junction, avoiding Euston and via Birmingham New Street.

Durham > Watford Junction - Search Results | TrainSplit

TrainSplit compares routes & fares to get the best value through split ticketing with no booking fee & saving up to 90%

trainsplit.com

 

[Egg Centric]

Perfect, thank you. I was trying instead using operators and that didn't seem to be so successful.

I can get this working by choosing Durham to Watford Junction, avoiding Euston and via Birmingham New Street.

Durham > Watford Junction - Search Results | TrainSplit

TrainSplit compares routes & fares to get the best value through split ticketing with no booking fee & saving up to 90%

trainsplit.com

Just booking that journey now and another seat selector question - this is quite unusual, never seen the Irn Bru colour before?



(tbh if there were a way to get standard premium I'd be fine with that but otoh it's not my money [well a % of it is])

wait, this doesn't make sense - I tried to change the seat and it said it was marked as for first class ticket holders, which is exactly what I'm buying?

@Adam Williams any chance you could do me a solid and move me on the above booking on the Birmingham to Watford stretch to a chair not sitting next to anyone? Booking ref is JLH82XT9. I'll owe ya a pint if we ever meet

Do feel free to tell me to sod off

Also I am just booking the bit back which I got distracted by at booking and exactly the same issue occurring with golden seats, although at least this time there is a legend:



Seems the seat selector thinks I'm going standard when I'm not

 

[yorkie]

I believe some of the issues relate to rail industry data while others relate to a particular supplier to Trainsplit who provides the seat reservation system, so it's not always possible to obtain the desired seat even if available.

@Miken @Egg Centric if you don't have your desired seats you can send me details of what you require and I will try to get it for you while I'm on my train tomorrow morning

 

[Adam Williams]

Thanks @yorkie

To give a brief update on some of these things from my perspective:

• I have one ticket open with RDG/their supplier about the industry reservations system being demonstrably badly configured for Raileasy in production; no response yet. We have proved pretty conclusively that it's not set-up correctly.
• @Egg Centric was given a new seat reservation on Thurs evening
• There's a ticket open about the fare class being detected incorrectly; we will try and work around this but it probably needs escalating to someone else, too (when we look at the root cause)

 

[Egg Centric]

@yorkie @Adam Williams - yes @Adam Williams gave me a new reservation via DM but I didn't mention it publicly as I am not sure he wants to encourage others to DM him for this sort of support as devs generally don't (as you know I could in principle help out any of the now close to 1 million users on our software - all of whom are real people due to the nature of it - but I certainly wouldn't want to encourage that either, too busy conquering the world or bust!) . I am enormously grateful though and we have discussed the cider in return for a future date

The initial journey went fine today* so it would be a bit late to intervene anyway...

Btw this is the first time I've seen it offer me a return as it was cheaper than a single, I liked that. Especially as it was part of 4 or 5 tickets combined for the split.

*Which was a shame. I was hoping I'd miss the connection in New Street to get some sweet delay repay.

 

[Miken]

I believe some of the issues relate to rail industry data while others relate to a particular supplier to Trainsplit who provides the seat reservation system, so it's not always possible to obtain the desired seat even if available.

@Miken @Egg Centric if you don't have your desired seats you can send me details of what you require and I will try to get it for you while I'm on my train tomorrow morning

Thanks yorkie, Really appreciate the offer - am happy to wait for a fix to come along (it will be a really useful enhancement to me if it were to be sorted) in the meantime will continue to use this site for my many business bookings - still by far the best booking engine I've used in 20+ years of UK rail travel...

 

[181]

Apologies if this has been discussed already -- I haven't read the whole thread -- but is there any chance of making it possible to make bookings where some passengers have railcards and others don't, or different passengers have different railcards?

 

[MrJeeves]

is there any chance of making it possible to make bookings where some passengers have railcards and others don't, or different passengers have different railcards?

There's currently no way to do this from a journey search.

Our suggested method is the perform the search initially with one set of railcards, add the tickets to your basket, then perform a second search with the next set of railcards and add those tickets to your basket, etc.

This does mean that you need to double check to ensure that your tickets are for the same services with the same itineraries manually, especially for advance tickets.

 

[ainsworth74]

Apologies if this has been discussed already -- I haven't read the whole thread -- but is there any chance of making it possible to make bookings where some passengers have railcards and others don't, or different passengers have different railcards?

Further to @MrJeeves I believe it is on the list of desired improvements however these things take time!

 

[181]

Further to @MrJeeves I believe it is on the list of desired improvements however these things take time!

Good to know it's on the list, thankyou.

 

[Mojo]

When I search for a journey that involves travel on a LNER 225, it offers reservations in a Coach P. Is this connected with the issues you mention above?

 

[Haywain]

When I search for a journey that involves travel on a LNER 225, it offers reservations in a Coach P. Is this connected with the issues you mention above?

Coach P is for bike spaces.

 

[Adam Williams]

Coach P appears in the list coaches response when we ask using the NRS-compatible interface:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?>
<OC>
    <L o="YRK" d="KGX" s="GR3000" t="16102023" a="SEAT">
        <C u="P" s="0" c="4009" d="P/ NB/SB/ELECTRIC/CYCLE"></C>
        <C u="M" s="1" c="4018" d="EC/E/SB/COACH M/1ST"></C>
        <C u="L" s="2" c="4017" d="EC/E/SB/COACH L/1ST/W"></C>
        <C u="K" s="3" c="4016" d="EC/E/SB/COACHK/1ST"></C>
        <C u="H" s="4" c="4015" d="EC/E/SB/COACH H/STD/B"></C>
        <C u="F" s="5" c="4014" d="EC/E/SB/COACH F/STD/W"></C>
        <C u="E" s="6" c="4013" d="EC/E/SB/COACH E/STD"></C>
        <C u="D" s="7" c="4012" d="EC/E/SB/COACH D/STD"></C>
        <C u="C" s="8" c="4011" d="EC/E/SB/COACH C/STD/50"></C>
        <C u="B" s="9" c="4010" d="EC/E/SB/COACH B/STD/Q"></C>
    </L>
</OC>

We are given the following layout by the industry's reservation system, with all of the below places marked up as forwards-facing seats in the SVG:



If we ask the reservation system information about the available spaces in this coach, we are told they are all places with the SEAT attribute set, so the coach is displayed within the SeatSelector:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?>
<OP>
    <L o="YRK" d="KGX" s="GR3000" t="16102023" c="P">
        <P u="P01 ">
            <U c="SEAT"></U>
        </P>
        <P u="P02 ">
            <U c="SEAT"></U>
        </P>
        <P u="P03 ">
            <U c="SEAT"></U>
        </P>
        <P u="P04 ">
            <U c="SEAT"></U>
        </P>
        <P u="P05 ">
            <U c="SEAT"></U>
        </P>
    </L>
</OP>

If you have further questions about the quality of the data maintained by LNER in the reservation system, I would suggest directing these to the TOC.

I suspect the TOC has abused coach P to also contain some counted places, to be honest (counted places seem to require a coach and X and Y co-ordinates in RARS2/S3 Passenger).

These are cycle spaces, which only "ticket" type BIK can book. They're not counted places. It's unclear why the coach is exposed in the ListCoaches request.

 

[Watershed]

If you have further questions about the quality of the data maintained by LNER in the reservation system, I would suggest directing these to the TOC.

To be fair, I don't think that a reliable seat selector can be put together solely using the data in industry systems.