Shrewsbury to Euston Super Off Peak Return valid on 1546 from Euston?

[burns20]

Travelling down to London today at about 1430, coming back I usually use the 1546 to Crewe and down to Shrewsbury, I'm coming back on Tuesday afternoon

I can't find the £27.50 Super Off Peak Return valid on any train after 1pm online as an E-Ticket

Has something changed?

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Purchase flexible single/return tickets & Travelcards – in 3 clicks, at face value with no fees. Every British rail fare shown, railcard discounts included.

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[Watershed]

Travelling down to London today at about 1430, coming back I usually use the 1546 to Crewe and down to Shrewsbury, I'm coming back on Tuesday afternoon

I can't find the £27.50 Super Off Peak Return valid on any train after 1pm online as an E-Ticket

Has something changed?

Purchase flexible walk-up fares for any British train journey

Purchase flexible single/return tickets & Travelcards – in 3 clicks, at face value with no fees. Every British rail fare shown, railcard discounts included.

www.brfares.com

I suspect it's an issue with the route - going via Crewe is neither the shortest route, nor does it involve taking a direct train. Therefore you are reliant on the Routeing Guide to validly travel that way, and whilst it is a mapped route, there is a negative easement which prevents journey planners from offering that route.

Timewise you are perfectly valid to travel on the 15:46 as it is outside of the restricted times.

 

[burns20]

Thanks

 

[kieron]

The easement in question reads:

700285 (Circuitous Route) Customers travelling from Shrewsbury to London Euston in possession of tickets routed "ATW and LM only" may not travel via Crewe. This easement applies in both directions.

It works because it's restricted to the a specific route. The data uses route codes rather than names, so it has survived the demise of ATW & LM.

 

[Wolfie]

I suspect it's an issue with the route - going via Crewe is neither the shortest route, nor does it involve taking a direct train. Therefore you are reliant on the Routeing Guide to validly travel that way, and whilst it is a mapped route, there is a negative easement which prevents journey planners from offering that route.

Timewise you are perfectly valid to travel on the 15:46 as it is outside of the restricted times.

You can though take the 1546 and change at Rugby to travel via Birmingham. That is often offered as a routing option.

== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: 28 Jun 2021 ==

The easement in question reads:

700285 (Circuitous Route) Customers travelling from Shrewsbury to London Euston in possession of tickets routed "ATW and LM only" may not travel via Crewe. This easement applies in both directions.

It works because it's restricted to the a specific route. The data uses route codes rather than names, so it has survived the demise of ATW & LM.

Interesting. So it won't work electronically but manually, given that neither ATW not LM exist anymore... Why should passengers be expected to know the names of former operators if the railway industry can't be bothered to update things in a timely manner?

 

[JB_B]

The easement in question reads:

700285 (Circuitous Route) Customers travelling from Shrewsbury to London Euston in possession of tickets routed "ATW and LM only" may not travel via Crewe. This easement applies in both directions.

It works because it's restricted to the a specific route. The data uses route codes rather than names, so it has survived the demise of ATW & LM.

Similarly...

"700838 Customers travelling from Liverpool Lime Street and Liverpool South Parkway to Preston, Kirkham & Wesham, Blackpool North, Lancaster or Oxenholme the Lake District on tickets priced on fare routes (00474; 00515 and 00516) VIRGIN TRAINS may travel via Crewe. This map easement applies in both directions".

(Of course, the route descriptors for fare routes 00474, 00515, 00516 have long since been updated to "Avanti").


To the extent that they overlap, the routeing guide data and the public routeing guide pdfs (and maps) are always perfectly in sync - presumably the RG data is used to create the pdfs. The route descriptors, however, originate from the fares data instead. That makes me wonder if the human-readable easement texts in the RG data just haven't been regenerated to reflect changes in the fares data.

 

[RJ]

Hang on. Is the route showing as valid before 1pm then? When I worked at London Midland there was a problem in the data - if the journey involved boarding a train on any leg of the journey after 1630, it wouldn’t show as valid.

This was not how the restriction read or was intended but for people going to places at the distant end of the network, the 1246 ex Euston was apparently the last train of the day. I was also impacted by this at Liverpool when I was refused a Super Off Peak ticket despite starting my journey at 1550 because nobody wanted to read what the restriction actually said. Had no choice but to get a more expensive ticket and never got my money back

 

[Wolfie]

Hang on. Is the route showing as valid before 1pm then? When I worked at London Midland there was a problem in the data - if the journey involved boarding a train on any leg of the journey after 1630, it wouldn’t show as valid.

This was not how the restriction read or was intended but for people going to places at the distant end of the network, the 1246 ex Euston was apparently the last train of the day.

That hasn't changed. It's been a problem for years and absolutely nothing has been done to stop massively deceiving customers about the ticket they need. I wonder just how many millions of pounds extra that has made TOCs? It's remarkably coincidental that all of these "issues" favour the TOC.....

 

[RJ]

That hasn't changed. It's been a problem for years and absolutely nothing has been done to stop massively deceiving customers about the ticket they need. I wonder just how many millions of pounds extra that has made TOCs? It's remarkably coincidental that all of these "issues" favour the TOC.....

I see.

To the OP, I’d say crack on with your journey at 1546. 11 years ago I raised this with the Pricing Manager who introduced those Super Off Peak tickets and they confirmed it is permitted to interchange during the restricted time period.

If you need a reservation for the TfW leg, I’d say call them, visit a ticket office or PM one of the resident ticket office clerks. Or try their website - https://tfwrail.wales/before-your-journey/reserve