GWR Compulsory Reservations (or not)

[rob.rjt]

Quick question on travel from Windsor and Eton Central to Oxford via Slough on 11 September - when I am trying to buy a ticket, GWR is showing all the fast London to Oxford trains as reservation compulsory and with no availability on any of the xx.35 trains from Slough between 8.35am and 8.35pm (I've not checked outside those times). Is this actually the case or is it a hold over from when they tried to make all trains reservation compulsory?

Will I end up in trouble if I just buy a ticket at the station and board the next train to Oxford at Slough?

 

[Bletchleyite]

Other than the Caledonian Sleeper and Eurostar no UK train service is now actually compulsory reservation. It is just the timetable data.

 

[rob.rjt]

Thanks. I thought it may have been. Nothing like encouraging travel by train is there.

 

[Tallguy]

Other than the Caledonian Sleeper and Eurostar no UK train service is now actually compulsory reservation. It is just the timetable data.

Have LNER dropped the requiremen?

 

[Hadders]

Have LNER dropped the requiremen?

No reservation required to travel on LNER.

 

[Nicholas43]

Quick question on travel from Windsor and Eton Central to Oxford via Slough on 11 September - when I am trying to buy a ticket, GWR is showing all the fast London to Oxford trains as reservation compulsory and with no availability on any of the xx.35 trains from Slough between 8.35am and 8.35pm (I've not checked outside those times).

I think this is a snafu with GWR's so-called website, I now suspect with lots of journeys requiring a change.
I've told them it won't sell tickets Radley to North Cotswolds (except on the Oxfordshire halts train). Windsor to Oxford fails on other dates I've looked at, except on slow trains. I reported it long ago, but they can't be bothered to fix it.

 

[robbeech]

Thanks. I thought it may have been. Nothing like encouraging travel by train is there.

Where is the incentive for operators to do so?

these sorts of farces with timetable data have existed for years. It seems there is always someone getting it wrong, they only get changed as a priority if it hurts them financially.

 

[Wallsendmag]

I think this is a snafu with GWR's so-called website, I now suspect with lots of journeys requiring a change.
I've told them it won't sell tickets Radley to North Cotswolds (except on the Oxfordshire halts train). Windsor to Oxford fails on other dates I've looked at, except on slow trains. I reported it long ago, but they can't be bothered to fix it.

Is it that or is it just that the trains still have a compulsory reservation flag and when the train if full you can’t book anything

 

[Nicholas43]

Is it that or is it just that the trains have a compulsory reservation flag and when the train if full you can’t book anything

GWR won't let me book eg Radley>Charlbury when obvs all trains are not full, and can be booked Oxford > Charlbury.
For eg 22 Sept, GWR won't let me book Windsor to Oxford. LNER (for example) has no problem.

 

[Wallsendmag]

GWR won't let me book eg Radley>Charlbury when obvs all trains are not full, and can be booked Oxford > Charlbury.
For eg 22 Sept, GWR won't let me book Windsor to Oxford. LNER (for example) has no problem.

Score one for us then.

 

[Nicholas43]

Score one for us then.

Only 0.9, because you can't / won't do cycle reservations .

 

[crosscity]

Is it that or is it just that the trains still have a compulsory reservation flag and when the train if full you can’t book anything

I wanted to find out what was going on with booking on-line as a member of family have been scratching their heads recently, and came to me to sort it out.

My adult grandson and a friend had booked to see the boxing at the O2 last Saturday, and a month or so ago asked me about getting there and back from Birmingham. I advised them to book a hotel and travel out on Saturday, and come back on Sunday morning and to avoid the Chiltern line as there were no trains from Marylebone on Sunday. They heeded my advice and about a week before came back to say they couldn't buy any train tickets as the trains were full!

I said that's ridiculous as it's a walk-on railway. You can just turn up at Kings Norton, hand over £38 each for an Any Permitted Super Off-Peak Return to London Stations and away you go. He said they'd prefer to know they'd got their tickets before they went so I said I'd book them.

I haven't made a long-distance journey since the pandemic started so I gladly took on the task. Firstly I tried the Ticket machine at Kings Norton and that definitely would sell me the tickets so I knew that BR fares was correct and the ticket still existed. When booking on-line before the pandemic I would use the GWR website to get Nectar points, so I thought I'd try that as a kind of reward for booking the tickets. GWR would not sell me them, no matter what I did but seemed to want me to buy First Class ones at a far higher price! A message inferred the trains were fully-booked.

I used Trainsplit which sold me the £38 tickets, and reserved seats on trains that GWR had said were full.

It's pretty irritating. Is it worth complaining to GWR (I'm out of pocket in Nectar points!)?

 

[Will Mitchell]

I just had the same issue. I was unable to buy a standard super off peak from BRI to PAD between 0900 and 1030 for travel today. Neither GWR or Trainline websites would sell me one. RTT says ‘Reservations Compulsory’. Is this just an attempt by the operators to prevent overcrowding or are some intercity services now reservation only?

 

[Watershed]

I just had the same issue. I was unable to buy a standard super off peak from BRI to PAD between 0900 and 1030 for travel today. Neither GWR or Trainline websites would sell me one. RTT says ‘Reservations Compulsory’. Is this just an attempt by the operators to prevent overcrowding or are some intercity services now reservation only?

The only services that are actually reservation-only are those that were before the pandemic - Caledonian Sleeper and Eurostar.

Various other operators, including XC, LNER, Avanti, GWR and Lumo have the 'compulsory reservation' flag set on (some of) their train schedules, however this is purely a bodge to force booking engines to issue reservations.

 

[Nicholas43]

Many (/all?) GWR reservable trains are currently set as reservations mandatory, and apparently some are sold out this weekend (because of a rugby match?)
That's a different issue from the original Windsor>Oxford. That was a bug with journeys where the first leg isn't reservable, now fixed.