Am trying to book Birmingham New St to Carlisle during the S&C diversions but I can't coax the Journey Planner to come up with the quickest (diverted) journeys when the S&C service starts at Wigan North Western (WGN).
As an example on 02/01, the
12:07 off New St arrives at WGN at 13:37, with the
connection leaving WGN at 13:53 and getting in to Carlisle at 16:28. If I pop a simple
New St to Carlisle search at 12:00 into the Forum Site, it recognises a 16:28 arrival, but wants me to either catch the 12:01 XC or 12:04 LNR to Stafford, and then change there onto what is the 12:07 from New St there (i.e leaving a couple of minutes earlier and adding an extra change). If you pick the journey starting at 12:07, you're made to change at Crewe with a 2+ hour wait for the next Avanti which connects into the 18:32 arrival into Carlisle instead.
I tried restricting to
just Avanti trains,
just trains via Warrington to cut out any other routes and both filters (though that returned no results full stop) but can't get the 4.5-ish hour journeys to show. If I pop the same journey into the Avanti site, the quicker one change journeys come up straight away so I don't think it's a reservations issue. Interestingly
for the journey two hours earlier, where the S&C train starts at Wolves, an all-Avanti journey with a change at Stafford shows up on the forum site though not yet bookable.
If anybody knows what the settings are to get the quicker journeys to show up without a two hour wait somewhere, I'd be very grateful!
(Image shows a 12:00 Birmingham New St to Carlisle search on the Avanti site, with the quicker 4.5 hour journeys the only ones showing)