Easements guide

[David Goddard]

Good evening all

Sorry if this has been asked recently, but please can someone direct me to where I can download the guide to routing easements?
I used to pull off a new copy every few months pre-Covid, but have not needed to for over two years now.
Planning some trips in the near future where the easements will be useful

Thanks in advance

 

[Nottingham59]

This is where the subforum on RailUK Fares & Ticketing Guide points to. I assume it's the latest version.

http://iblocks-rg-publication.s3-website-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/easement_text.pdf

I hope you enjoy your trip!

 

[David Goddard]

Perfect, thank you so much. Will bookmark!
David

 

[Nottingham59]

I'd suggest you take a printed copy of the guide with you, if you find any particularly juicy easements to exploit. Just because an easement exists doesn't mean that Revenue Protection Inspectors will have heard of it. (And even if you show them in black and white, they may not care.)

 

[yorkie]

The easements are intended to be used to make journeys easier/viable and to be automatically applied by journey planners when a passenger is searching for a journey.

The electronic data does not always match the human readable text and I don't think it is intended for people to go looking through the list with the intention of taking advantage of them

Anything permitted by an easement will be reflected in the journey planner of any accredited ticket booking site and any ticket issued in conjunction with an itinerary should* be accepted for use in accordance with the stated itinerary.

(* There have been some recent disputes regarding this, however, particularly involving CrossCountry, whose staff do not always honour this)

 

[eoff]

Can anyone suggest new Easements?

For example...

"700877 Customers travelling from Dunbar to Prestonpans, may travel via Edinburgh. This local
easement applies in both directions"

Why not Musselburgh as well as Edinburgh? I have made this journey a few times.

 

[Graham H]

Presumably with an easement you cant break a journey ? So from eoff's example a nice day out in Edinburgh cant be had by purchasing a Dunbar to Prestonpans return ?

== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: 26 Feb 2022 ==

Obviously got my interest so I checked some of my local ones. 700036 says "Customers travelling from Warblington, Emsworth, Southbourne, Nutbourne, Bosham, Fishbourne and Chichester to Pulborough and beyond, may travel via Ford. This easement applies in both directions" Am I being daft as I cant think that there would be any other route to travel anyway as all trains from the mentioned stations go through/stop at Ford as part of the journey.
In fact there seem to be quite a few that seem nonsensical at first glance such as "Customers travelling from Lockerbie via Haymarket may travel via Carstairs. This easement applies in both directions."

 

[robbeech]

I think it’s important to understand what easements are for as Yorkie mentions above.
The routeing guide is used to determine mapped routes for a particular journey, along with mileage calculations. Sometimes this doesn’t ‘fit’ with what the railway intends. It then uses positive and negative easements to make it work for passengers and themselves in terms of revenue and convenience.

There can sometimes be advantages to positive easements that were not intended but operators do not change things as the benefits outweigh the costs.

In other instances they don’t know about it, at least until someone tries to use it or posts about it on here.

The reason Dunbar Prestonpans is valid via Edinburgh is to allow people to get fast services from Dunbar. It’s not intended to be used as a sneaky way of getting to Edinburgh cheaper and if caught doing this, whilst it’s technically permitted I suspect they’d look to change it quite quickly meaning either the price would go up to match the Edinburgh fare, or the easement would be withdrawn making it much more difficult for passengers to travel. It’s entirely possible that the existence of this question has already set the wheels in motion for that change to happen.

Sometimes a negative easement will be put in place where a route between two groups is mapped but the railway doesn’t want passengers to travel a particular way but it’s not able to achieve this using a route restricted ticket.

Some retailers make a dog’s dinner of implementing this data into their algorithms and can end up producing itineraries for routes that would not normally be valid. Of course it IS valid in conjunction with an itinerary but sadly some operators still unlawfully reject this. Gone are the days where the railway respects the rules it creates, unless it falls in their favour of course.

 

[eoff]

The reason Dunbar Prestonpans is valid via Edinburgh is to allow people to get fast services from Dunbar. It’s not intended to be used as a sneaky way of getting to Edinburgh cheaper and if caught doing this, whilst it’s technically permitted I suspect they’d look to change it quite quickly meaning either the price would go up to match the Edinburgh fare, or the easement would be withdrawn making it much more difficult for passengers to travel. It’s entirely possible that the existence of this question has already set the wheels in motion for that change to happen.

I would be surprised if the fare is cheaper. Anyway, I just assumed the easment was there because you would be going the 'wrong way' at some point in the journey because there is no direct service.

 

[robbeech]

I would be surprised if the fare is cheaper. Anyway, I just assumed the easment was there because you would be going the 'wrong way' at some point in the journey because there is no direct service.

I’ll admit to not having looked at a)journey opportunities and b) the fares for those stations but ultimately the easement is there to allow things that ordinarily wouldn’t be possible using the standard set of algorithms.

If indeed there are no direct journeys then you rightly state that this easement is crucial to allow this flow.

 

[kieron]

Can anyone suggest new Easements?

For example...

"700877 Customers travelling from Dunbar to Prestonpans, may travel via Edinburgh. This local
easement applies in both directions"

Why not Musselburgh as well as Edinburgh? I have made this journey a few times.

You can certainly suggest changes to Scotrail, but you don't need to in this case.

The routeing guide is full of vague and contradictory rules. Two of its rules are:

1. On page F10, "Journeys between the stations shown on the ticket ... by the shortest route which can be used by scheduled passenger services (including change of trains); are always following a permitted route."

2. On page F7, "Also permitted is the route followed by direct trains to and from the common routeing point if the journey is made on those trains."

Dunbar-Musselburgh-Prestonpans is the shortest route on the above terms, and Edinburgh is a common routeing point for Dunbar and Prestonpans which has direct trains to and from each.

Different web sites interpret the routeing guide in different ways, but gwr.com accepts either route.

If you're going to Wallyford rather than Prestonpans, gwr.com only accepts a change at Musselburgh, and scotrail.co.uk only accepts a change at Edinburgh.

It is a mess, but you don't really need the rules to change if you can get a retailer to confirm that whatever you want to do is permitted.

 

[yorkie]

Can anyone suggest new Easements?

For example...

"700877 Customers travelling from Dunbar to Prestonpans, may travel via Edinburgh. This local
easement applies in both directions"

Why not Musselburgh as well as Edinburgh? I have made this journey a few times.

No easement required for Dunbar to Prestonpans; it's valid anyway.

The easement is required for Dunbar to Musselburgh; there are no mapped routes as there is a common routeing point and a doubleback is detected, so the easement is required.

(No doubleback is detected for Dunbar to Prestonpans as Prestonpans is not a timing point, so no easement required)

I’ll admit to not having looked at a)journey opportunities and b) the fares for those stations but ultimately the easement is there to allow things that ordinarily wouldn’t be possible using the standard set of algorithms.

If indeed there are no direct journeys then you rightly state that this easement is crucial to allow this flow.

There are direct trains from Dunbar at 0655, 1102, 1301, 1506, 1711 and the return journey at 1019, 1218 etc., so going via Edinburgh allows a lot more choice.

The fare to Edinburgh is actually cheaper! A passenger travelling from Dunbar to Musselburgh can save money if they get a ticket to Edinburgh and are able to use a direct train (to break their 'journey', which is ostensibly from Dunbar to Edinburgh) in at least one direction.

 

[A S Leib]

Can anyone suggest new Easements?

For example...

"700877 Customers travelling from Dunbar to Prestonpans, may travel via Edinburgh. This local
easement applies in both directions"

Why not Musselburgh as well as Edinburgh? I have made this journey a few times.

I can find tickets from Hemel, Apsley and Kings Langley to the West Midlands via Watford Junction and from Wolverton via Milton Keynes, but I'm not sure if they're already easements.

 

[yorkie]

I can find tickets from Hemel, Apsley and Kings Langley to the West Midlands via Watford Junction and from Wolverton via Milton Keynes, but I'm not sure if they're already easements.

Looking at Hemel Hempstead to Birmingham New Street as just one example, fares are routed:

• West Midlands Trains (WMR/LNR brands) only
• Not via London
• Watford Not London

The Not via London fares are not valid via Watford Jn, as Watford Jn fails the fares check.

The Watford Not London fares are of course valid as the ticket is routed that way.

Easements are not applicable to this case; if anyone would like to know if a particular ticket is valid, the best thing to do is check if ticket booking sites will issue an itinerary and if anyone has any questions please create a new thread