Any Permitted Tickets not valid on LNER from 2nd August???

[Starmill]

In this, I believe Starmill is wrong unless I have misunderstood. The advanced booking horizon at 24 weeks (ish) opens bookings for Advance tickets for all 'LNER only' journeys.

I'm sure that there's every possibility of this being the intention, yes. However the practice very much appears not to be that. If I try to run a search for 7 December say in the LNER app for Inverness to London I get Advance tickets with a single for £56. But if I search for Inverness to Perth I get an error message saying sorry but there's no timetable available yet. Even though the train I could buy to London calls at Perth. But when I change the date to 28 September I can book both. This was just the first example I happened to try because I knew the train's departure times were the same.

== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: 12 Jul 2025 ==

Correct and the case of being Advance only goes way back to at least 2014 when I began my involvement in the process of the extended horizon.

It definitely goes back a lot earlier than that, I remember buying them on East Coast not long after NXEC had departed, it was primarily intended as a way to compete with the airlines.

== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: 12 Jul 2025 ==

Northern's dirt cheap AP fares are moving passengers away from the likes of Avanti and CrossCountry (which is fantastic).

It goes to show how warped the industry really is that a three car 323 running at a heavy standing load into Manchester is substantially cheaper than an eleven car Pendolino arriving at a very similar time, which has almost nobody on it from London because it costs almost £200 to use, and is at full price from Crewe and Wilmslow.

Of course the above situation suits me personally beautifully because I get to travel in a Pendolino coach that only has ten other passengers in it and is lovely and chilly on a melting hot day. Shame about basically everyone else both in the industry and travelling public who has to deal with all the negative consequences of that though. Especially the conductor who has no choice but to work that 323 in those conditions, and the passengers from Handforth etc who have no alternative public transport at all to Manchester.

Makes sense though that the industry is in such a terrible state when people suggest that this is "fantastic".

== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: 12 Jul 2025 ==

I don't doubt that a much simpler arrangement could be put in place for GBR-only routes once they have taken over all DfT franchises, since any distribution of revenue will then purely be for internal accounting purposes. But some ORCATS-like arrangement will still be needed for flows that involve non-GBR operators.

You are also taking the position as it applies on certain long distance operators (and only some of them at any rate - Avanti and GWR are a completely different kettle of fish to LNER for example) and extrapolating it as if the entire network ran that way. Long distance operators make up only a relatively small proportion of overall journeys and revenue.

Off-Peak tickets still make up the lion's share of both, and with leisure travel continuing to grow faster than other sectors, that will be the case for the foreseeable future. They are far from the 'miniscule' part of the picture you make them out to be.

The issue with chucking the whole lot in the bin and coming up with something new, even though I quite agree that would probably be very desirable, if Transport for Wales, ScotRail / Cal Sleepers or Merseyrail got a whiff that even a small amount of money might end up going to GBR instead of them, they'd simply kick off about it. Why wouldn't they, after all, given they can effectively torpedo any changes? They are incentivised to hold the status quo over for as long as possible unless there's a clear upside offered to them as some kind of sweetener. Especially Transport for Wales, who have strong political backing and a government which is quite twitchy about its relation to the central government.