Fare oddities(?) to / from Sunderland

[A S Leib]

There's an off-peak return between Sunderland and Finsbury Park routed Grand Central only; it does have a Maltese cross, so would the expectation be to use the Victoria / Piccadilly line rather than Thameslink / Great Northern?

There's also a 'not via London' fare from Sunderland to Watford (Met), which presumably means via Newcastle, Birmingham, Princes Risborough and Aylesbury; whether or not the ticket would be accepted at the Watford gate line, or if it's possible to buy that ticket, is beyond me. Trying the TfW Rail app for Sunderland – Watford Underground (not via London) doesn't give any results, despite there being, in theory, a difference in price between the not via London and via London fares.

 

[NorthOxonian]

There's an off-peak return between Sunderland and Finsbury Park routed Grand Central only; it does have a Maltese cross, so would the expectation be to use the Victoria / Piccadilly line rather than Thameslink / Great Northern?

There's also a 'not via London' fare from Sunderland to Watford (Met), which presumably means via Newcastle, Birmingham, Princes Risborough and Aylesbury; whether or not the ticket would be accepted at the Watford gate line, or if it's possible to buy that ticket, is beyond me. Trying the TfW Rail app for Sunderland – Watford Underground (not via London) doesn't give any results, despite there being, in theory, a difference in price between the not via London and via London fares.

I'm not sure about the Finsbury Park fare (as that is specifically set as Sunderland to Finsbury Park) but for Watford it appears to be down to a cluster of stations all sharing the same fares. In this case, the fare is actually set for Q372 (a group consisting of various stations centred on Newcastle - including all of Tyne and Wear but extending out to Prudhoe and Seaham) to Q097: a group consisting of various stations immediately bordering London served by Chiltern - including both Met stations like Rickmansworth and Chiltern Main Line stations like Beaconsfield and Denham.

For a journey like Newcastle to Beaconsfield this routing actually makes some sense; it's a single change walking across Birmingham, plus potentially another somewhere like Banbury/High Wycombe depending on Chiltern's stopping patterns. Indeed considering the recently released data shows 120 tickets were sold for Newcastle - Beaconsfield, it is likely that reasonable numbers do use this route. But the "not via London" route for Watford is far more intricate and I would be surprised if anyone used it - I certainly don't think that fare is deliberate and more just a side effect of the way these clusters work.

 

[Bungle965]

There's an off-peak return between Sunderland and Finsbury Park routed Grand Central only; it does have a Maltese cross, so would the expectation be to use the Victoria / Piccadilly line rather than Thameslink / Great Northern?

Most amusing is the fact that Grand Central having a buy on board policy yet for this Grand Central routed ticket they wouldn't actually be able to sell this onboard!

 

[Ralph Ayres]

There's an off-peak return between Sunderland and Finsbury Park routed Grand Central only; it does have a Maltese cross, so would the expectation be to use the Victoria / Piccadilly line rather than Thameslink / Great Northern?

A cross-London ticket should normally have the LU leg sandwiched between two NR legs rather than ending on LU so wouldn't be technically valid by that route; it should be to U12. Noting though that all tickets Sunderland-Finsbury Park have the Maltese cross, I suspect it's a pragmatic solution to making sure they work LU gates when doubling-back given that the LU/NR interavailability rules on that stretch means you can use LU on an NR-only ticket and are quite likely to as trains are more frequent.