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What happened to the 'Other Valid Routes' option on National Rail Enquiries

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trevmonk

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NRE recently introduced an option to display valid routes for any particular ticket. If you hit the 'details' button for an itinerary it gave you the option to show all valid routes as a red line on a map (although it required a lot of zooming to make the station names appear).

Now that seems to have vanished, although the "other services you may use" button remains. However that just displays different departure times on the most obvious route. Seeing the valid routes in map form was very useful and sometimes revealed routes you might not have considered.
 
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Jonfun

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NRE recently introduced an option to display valid routes for any particular ticket. If you hit the 'details' button for an itinerary it gave you the option to show all valid routes as a red line on a map (although it required a lot of zooming to make the station names appear).

Now that seems to have vanished, although the "other services you may use" button remains. However that just displays different departure times on the most obvious route. Seeing the valid routes in map form was very useful and sometimes revealed routes you might not have considered.

How bizzare, it seems to have disappeared for me too. I was only commenting the other day how useful all of the permitted routes for the ticket being shown in map form was. The journeys I tried all seemed to show accurate routings, and I noted also the routings were accurate for the individual ticket - so an advance ticket would only show the one route as per the routing of the 'booked train', whereas an Anytime would show all permitted routes as per the routing guide.

I hope that it will eventually replace the passenger unfriendly routing guide as the definitive, black and white source of whether a route is or isn't valid. It'll make life significantly easier for both staff and passenger if you can instantly bring up a map that says yay or nay. However, I found it difficult to access the information on my mobile, so perhaps before it is rolled out further, they could work on a better mobile interface for those of us who want to use it on the go?
 

Solent&Wessex

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One of it's main weaknesses was that, despite over 2 years of development, testing, feedback and tinkering, for some journeys it still kept showing some routes as valid which were neither valid nor even vaguely reasonable, but omitted some perfectly valid routes.
 

Merseysider

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One of it's main weaknesses was that, despite over 2 years of development, testing, feedback and tinkering, for some journeys it still kept showing some routes as valid which were neither valid nor even vaguely reasonable, but omitted some perfectly valid routes.
But the Routeing Guide does that too, and that's been around far longer! ;)
 

trevmonk

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Just noticed the 'other valid routes' feature on NRE is back. Perhaps its temporary disappearance had something to do with the introduction of then new Routeing Guide online tools.
 

benk1342

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I have found this feature to be very promising but of little use in practice. In my experience it shows only routes that are actually used on the itineraries that your search returned, rather than all valid routes.
 

Bletchleyite

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Just noticed the 'other valid routes' feature on NRE is back. Perhaps its temporary disappearance had something to do with the introduction of then new Routeing Guide online tools.

I noticed it disappearing - it was there for a search, then not there for a further one.

Dare I say if it is *that* hard to represent valid routes in code, it's probably just a little too complex? :)
 
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