New Rail Journey Planner

Fares supremo Barry Doe is recommending www.fastjp.com - see Rail Magazine 786. This is by Paul Kelly and Nick Brown, the creators of Trainsplit.com the website which can find you significant fare savings by showing you where to spilt your ticket (NOT your journey).

Barry continues to recommend brfares.com, but future plans for fastjp are for "a major new system that will incorporate fares as well [as times]".

I like the fact that up to 5 start and/or end stations can be specified - useful for those times when there is more than one convenient station at either end of your journey (though places like (say) Manchester with several stations called Manchester something are - as is usual - grouped together as if one station  as an alternative to the separate stations.)

Barry dislikes the fact that most train fare websites constrain you to entering journey times, even if you plan to buy an "any time" ticket. We look forward to a site that allows the user to select ticket types before train times, if s/he wishes.

Beware of walk on fares being cheaper than fares booked for nominated dates on line

If I understand him correctly, fares supremo Barry Doe is saying (in Rail Magazine issue 770) that on some ticket websites (he does not name them) if you tell the system the date you are returning it doesn't offer you so-called open returns that are cheaper.

His example  is booking a journey where the out leg is a bargain basement £20 and the return leg is £73. Buyer assumes that £93 total is a good deal, but because s/he has not selected "open", the cheaper, walk-on return fare of £74 is not offered.

None of this is helped by the confusing and fairly recently changed nomenclature for the different tickets, especially as terms like "open" have changed their meaning - it is not an entirely new set of terms replacing the old ones.

Collecting online train tickets at the station

Normally collecting tickets bought on line (such as from the machines at Barking Station, for example), though it can be done at any machine, requires the card that was used to buy the tickets and the reference number provided by the ticket selling site. This is OK for most people, but not very handy for people who buy tickets on behalf of others.

But in Rail 765, Barry Doe says "it seems like some operators [which he doesn't name] ... allow some frequent 'trusted' customers to use any card to collect tickets. This means that those customers who have a history of successful purchases through the site are allowed to insert any card to bring up the on-screen keyboard on which to type in the reference number." "But, because there could [sc: can] be no general rule, people should be careful to check the wording on their printouts, to be sure they are allowed to do this."

By "printouts" I assume Barry means the information provided by the ticket selling website.

One such operator is Southern - See http://www.southernrailway.com/tickets-and-fares/buying-tickets/ticket-on-departure/ who allow this from ticket machines as well as human ticket clerks (only theirs I have to assume) and I'm not sure if you would have to buy tickets from their website.

Southwest, if I read it correctly, only allow it from human clerks - not from machines.

http://www.southwesttrains.co.uk/how-to-buy-tickets.aspx

Cheapest Gold Card

Barry Doe highlighted the cheapest Gold Card on the rail network as Lichfield Trent Valley to Lichfield City - see http://stibasa.blogspot.co.uk/2014/12/cheapest-gold-cards.html. Unfortunately, as he reports in Rail 765, London Midland Trains realised that this not often sold ticket had hardly risen in price for 19 years and they promptly put it up from £108 to £144! It is still the cheapest, but see the link for why you might consider the Isle of Wight (Ryde) card at £168 if you're likely to be using South West Trains.

Virgin Trains Luggage collection/delivery service - Bag Magic

See www.virgintrains.com/bagmagic.

Virgin Trains has started a bag collection/delivery service called Bag Magic. For £9.99 a bag weighing up to 30kg can be collected from your home on Mon-Fri and delivered to your final address the next day. The price is £16.99 for two bags.

At weekends the charge is £8 (1 bag) or £14 (2 bags) but the weight limit is 20kg and you will need to take the bag to a collection point and collect it from one, too, and there's a size limit of 38 x 38 x 64cm.

Let's hope other companies will also offer this system which was universal at one time back in British Rail days.

Thanks to Barry Doe / Rail Magazine issue 763 for the information.

Cheapest Gold Cards

According to fares supremo Barry Doe, in Rail Magazine issues 761 and 763, the cheapest Gold Card - £108 at current prices - will be Lichfield Trent Valley to/from City. The former cheapest Gold Card was Ryde St Johns Road to/from Ryde Esplanade on the Isle of Wight. This now costs £164, but, if bought at a South West Trains station, it (and I assume any South West Trains Gold Card) entitles the holder to 6 free South West trains tickets in the year. This may save you more than the £56 difference in price from the Lichfield one.

The discounts obtainable with a Gold Card, which change from 2015, are explained here:http://www.nationalrail.co.uk/times_fares/ticket_types/46573.aspx

Useful / interesting railway websites

Depends what you mean by useful, I suppose, but here goes. Some sites have been mentioned here before, but here they are together:

www.realtimetrains.co.uk

http://www.realtimetrains.co.uk/maps/areas/swml/1 - is a link to the first of a series of 6 diagrammatic real time train information. There are no links to it on the main page and the levels of folders aren't accessible, but there are links to pages 2-6 on this page itself.

www.brtimes.com

www.brfares.com - see also http://data.atoc.org/member-area (previous blog post explains).

www.opentraintimes.com previously metioned here has closed down, according to Barry Doe, but was working when I tested during writing this.

trains.im (Open National Rail times, maps and stats).

Thanks to Barry Doe and Rail magazine - p48 of issue 746 - for the information.

How to download the free National Rail fares database

Barry Doe explains in Rail Magazine, issue 749 (28 May - 10 June 2014) page 42. Go to http://data.atoc.org/member-area and create yourself an account. The download to go for is the Avantix fares database.

Please don't ask me for support doing this - I'm just passing on the info.

Split train tickets and save money

http://splitticket.moneysavingexpert.com/

I saw this useful utitility - Tickety Split - reviewed in A to B magazine. I'm not sure whether fares oracle Barry Doe has reviewed it yet, but I'm sure he will.

A split ticket means instead of buying a ticket from (say) Dorchester to Plymouth, you buy a ticket from Dorchester to Exeter and another from Exeter to Plymouth. You don't have to change trains at the spliiting station (Exeter in this example) - the split is valid if the train stops there.)

Currently Tickety Split only works with walk up single fares, so anyone who really wants to save money on fares can only really use it to uncover where to try out splitting their journey, and then use the information to save on advance fares. Independent rail ticket site redspottedhanky.com says (according to A to B) that "its licence forbids it from selling split tickets, although changes in the pipeline may allow it to offer advice of this kind."

Extending the range of ticket typess that Tickety Split can explore is a work in progress, and given the incredibly complex train fare system in this country, it may be some time before it can handle a really useful range of ticket types, but having internet based information about where these splitting points are must surely start a reform of this paricular "quirk" in the system.

Train timetable and fares websites

Thanks to The Fare Dealer Barry Doe for this information in Rail magazine issue 696.

brfares.com - enables looking up of fares without selecting trains. Barry says that some of the validities information is not accurate.

trains.im - full schedules of direct trains stopping points. In detailed mode it shows the full working timetable with passing points and distances.

opentraintimes.com - Barry says this is similar to the above. I don't see the point of it in that case, but at the time I tried it it wasn't finding my test stations.

Elsenham airport

Train fares supremo Barry Doe points out that train tickets from London to Elsenham are cheaper that those to, but also valid via. Stansted airport. An opportunity to save your self a little £. Dubious sustainability credentials I admit.

East Coast Abolish £5 minimum spend on ticket website

My main objection to this limit is that it was applied after you had typed in all your credit card details, shoe size, mother's maiden name. A little programming tweak would have brought the warning up at a much earlier point in the process and saved irritation. East Coast's predecessor ignored me when I flagged this bug up, but fares guru Barry Doe has used his contact and achievd the better result of removal of the £5 minimum. I last fell for this bug buying a £4.20 ticket. I would have happily paid £5 to avoid the hassle, and finished up paying £5.20 to a competitor who charges £1 per transaction.

Thanks Barry, thanks East Coast (at last).

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/

Best Rail Journey Planner

Fares and timetable supremo Barry Doe recommends:

http://jplanner.travelinenortheast.info/ which despite its name covers all the UK. It includes train reporting numbers (fka headcodes).

Train Tickets delivered to your mobile phone

http://www.mytrainticket.co.uk/ticket-delivery

According to the website this feature is "coming soon". Presumably other ticket sellers will follow suit and hasten the end of paper tickets. Fare supremo Barry Doe, as far as I know still recommends http://www.eastcoast.co.uk/ for the best ticket prices

A nice simple zonal fare structure?

You may think TfL's zonal fare system is nice and simple - and perhaps it is simpler - but a look at this page (publicised by Barry Doe) reveals the complexity we still have. In particular, the fares on te Euston <-> Watford line are an anomaly.

www.tfl.gov.uk/tickets/14416.aspx