RailPlanner

Train fares oracle Barry Doe recommends RailPlanner for planning rail journeys and mining your way through the Byzantine complexity of rail fares in the UK. He says current online journey planners show up journeys starting later at A, with changes at B, C and D, to arrive at E at the same time as you would have done if you'd just turned up a bit earlier at A. I can't say my testing using East Coast bears this out, though.  Barry's example in Rail Magazine (issue 671) involved catching the 1208 from Bradford on Sunday 15 May and arriving in London at 1522, with no changes, rather than catching the 1225 and changing twice to arrive in London at the same time. You might want to save the 17 minutes and pay by changing twice, but Barry's point is that with online planners - I don't know which - the direct and slightly slower train is hard  to find. I tested with Sunday 12 June and the engine found direct trains, and the interface allowed me easily to filter out trains with changes.

Now it's hard to find anyone who thinks that our train ticket system is clear and legible. There are situations where you can save money by buying separate tickets from A to B, B to C and C to D, instead of a ticket from A to D, and end up on the same train(s) youb would have by buying the through ticket. Plainly a nonsensical situation.

Barry says that offline RailPlanner gives some useful options for planning/ticketing that aren't available with online planners, but it is available in a browser accessible version and is presumably essentially the same on either platform. Barry recommends the 'silver' version, which costs £59.40 pa at the offer price he has negotiated. Presumably for some people, this would pay for itself by a combination of cheaper fares, simpler journeys, and reduced journey times.

So, here we have a relatively cheap software solution to the problem of train fare / journey planning complexity. Why not just piut it on the www let everyone use it for free? They could use it direct themselves, or via an agent at a ticket office or travel agent. Software should be able to find the best fares and journeys (not necessarily the quickest and cheapest) and the rail system would have a dataset of actual journeys/tickets to inform its planning. So the software would mine the information and save the trouble and cost/confusion of simplifying fares.

To take up Barry's offer you need to quote RAILoffer when ordering, which you can do by phone or using the pdf downloadable form  - post or fax! See http://www.travelinfosystems.com/