Merseyrail season tickets

[mickey]

Obviously this is directed at those in the know about Mersey local services, so apologies first to all outsiders!

Fed up with paying every day I've recently purchased a 'Railpass' from Merseyrail, and have two questions I hope someone will be able to answer.

1. Can they go through the ticket machines or do I have to go through the manual gates as people with Trios and Saveaways do? The ticket is standard orange stock (presumably the thicker season ticket one not the normal one as it was manually fed into the machine), but I don't think I've ever seen anyone actually use one in the gates. Indeed except at Lime St I've never seen the gates spit out any ticket at all - they're always retained.

2. Are they officially rail season tickets? Not as stupid a question as it sounds, because it could affect the splitting of tickets. If the answer's yes, for example, with a C1 ticket I could buy a ticket LPY-EUS/MAN even if the train doesn't stop there. The difficulty comes as, despite looking like a rail season ticket, being worded like one, and being issued only by a rail company, it could presumably count as a PTE ticket, hence my need for someone in the know to help with a clarification.

TIA!

 

[dave4jackie]

can answer the 1st question,they do work through the main barriers and come back out,also they are no different than the normal orange ticket that comes out,in other words it can get ripped unlike the old grey tickets

 

[scrapy]

Answering the second question, yes the railpass is a Merseytravel PTE product, so it would affect splitting tickets. You may as well buy a Lime St to Manchester/Euston season over a Liverpool South Parkway to MAN/EUS ticket as the fares are the same. Hough Green to Manchester seasons are cheaper if you have a zone C railpass but you cannot use the route via Newton le Willows. (Strangely a HGN - MAN off peak day return is more expensive than a LPY - MAN ticket!).

If your travelling LPY to EUS regularly an All Line Rover may be cheaper, and you wouldn't have to buy a railpass. (Im not sure about this!)

 

[mickey]

Thanks for both replies.

For the second, perhaps I picked a bad example... I wanted something one-off and chose MAN and EUS because I know there's trains to both that don't stop, but perhaps I should have checked fares first. For one that does matter, however, what about Runcorn? LPY-RUN is considerably cheaper than LIV-RUN, but presumably given what you've said I'd be stuck with the LM service over the express VT as it doesn't stop at LPY. Strange though - Merseytravel has nothing to do with railpasses except publicity leaflets (issue and design is solely by and through the train operator) and they explicitly say 'season' on them, yet they're not officially rail season tickets! If I didn't know our railways I'd call it farcical...

 

[Deerfold]

Strange though - Merseytravel has nothing to do with railpasses except publicity leaflets (issue and design is solely by and through the train operator) and they explicitly say 'season' on them, yet they're not officially rail season tickets! If I didn't know our railways I'd call it farcical...

Really? I'm not an expert on Merseyside, but it looks like a typical PTE product put together by the PTE who wil take the money (which will then be used as part of the money paid by Merseytravel to the rail operators).
The longer term ones are not available from all stations, but are available from Merseytravel offices, suggesting they've more to do with them.

 

[mickey]

Really? I'm not an expert on Merseyside, but it looks like a typical PTE product put together by the PTE who wil take the money (which will then be used as part of the money paid by Merseytravel to the rail operators).
The longer term ones are not available from all stations, but are available from Merseytravel offices, suggesting they've more to do with them.

Not quite true. Other Merseytravel tickets (Trios and Saveaways) are available at Merseytravel offices but NOT the railpass, which can only be issued using a standard railway ticket machine on orange ticket stock (Trios and Solos use date stamps). The bit about "certain stations" refers to annual tickets, which for some reason are only available at larger stations. I doubt the money goes back and forth to/from Merseytravel but have no proof either way so will trust your judgement on it.

 

[Skie]

The Annual railpasses are on silver rather than orange stock, which is probably why they are only available at larger stations (though I have bought plenty from a smaller station)

 

[mickey]

can answer the 1st question,they do work through the main barriers and come back out

Thanks for your help guys. Since this discussion I've tried it at all the Liverpool stations and come to the conclusion that season tickets DO NOT work at the barriers, except at Lime St., where apparently they are set to allow anything through them. This seems like a huge lack of foresight really, issuing orange tickets that don't work in the machines they'd like us to use, but at least I now have a definitive answer.