This advice from the ticket office is nonsense!
The rules about which route you are allowed to take are in the
National Routeing Guide.
To identify the Permitted Routes between Bradford Stations and Syon Lane, you first have to identify relevant
Routeing Points.
A list of
Routeing Point Groups shows that Bradford Forster Square and Bradford Interchange comprise
Bradford Group for routeing purposes.
Syon Lane is associated with
Barnes and
Hounslow Routeing Points. To find out which of these two can be used for a Bradford - Syon Lane journey, you need to perform a
fares check. The rules for this are in Step 4 of the Routeing Guide
Instructions.
In this instance, the Anytime Single fares Bradford - Syon Lane, Bradford - Barnes and Bradford - Hounslow are identical (£125), so both
Barnes and
Hounslow are appropriate Routeing Points for a Bradford - Syon Lane journey.
Then you need to look up Permitted Routed for Bradford - Barnes and Bradford - Hounslow. For both, the only routeing code is
LONDON.
Page A4 of the
Instructions tells us that
"If the routeing code is "LONDON", for all journeys via London you will need to cross reference routeing codes applicable "to London" with the code for the "from London" leg of the journey."
Therefore the Permitted Routes for the Bradford - London portion of a Bradford - Syon Lane journey are identical to the Permitted Routes for a Bradford -London journey.
These Permitted Routes include the Grand Central route (
map GU) and, alternatively, local routes Bradford - Leeds followed by the East Coast route (
map ER).
It really is surprising and disappointing that booking office staff (at Bradford?) didn't know this.
By the way,
IanD, welcome to the forum! The railway industry is full of abbreviations and one of them is that Super Off-Peak Return is abbreviated to SSR.
Indigo2 has explained why SOR is not appropriate.