It should work for Raileasy/TrainSplit.
Yeah it varies by retailer.
Partially our fault as I never implemented support for that field, but also I've looked now and reality does not match up with the docs we were given! Our implementation was honestly written in the span of a couple of days, we intentionally didn't do everything as a V1, but I'm looking at this now.
If we manage to find an exact match of the itinerary handed over to us, you _should_ be taken straight to the ticket info page with it, and with the exact fare you selected on NRE too. We then fall back to the cheapest available fare if we can't find the one you've handed over with, and then fall back to search results if we can't find the itinerary. The journey planner NRE uses also does some things like MCT handling differently to us/FastJP, so there are a couple of times where we can't find an exact match because of differences there.
Asking for TrainSplit and Raileasy felt like a stretch already to be honest. I think every single whitelabel operated by the same entity would be a bit much!
Is it a chargeable thing though or something they provide for free? Genuinely haven't given it any thought until now!
No charge.
)All fair enough! I wasn't complaining per se, just observing that even the better retailers don't get a perfect handover for whatever reason. I believe this to mainly be NRE's fault as, if they're to be the sort of source of truth then they ought to provide interopability which actually supports everything. It is odd in some ways because they only let you choose 30/60/90/120 MCTs which are actually represented (in their POST requests, which is another issue) by 1/2/3/4 respectively, so they don't even support the flexibility of say Raileasy, so Raileasy could translate their 1/2/3/4 back to 30/60/90/120.
Yes, this was exactly the problem.
What, seriously?
And, maybe you wouldn't want to answer this publicly, but if you find the RDG specs to be wrong do you have much recourse? I mean in this example you'd be hard-pushed to argue lost revenue over not handing over a 120 minute connection time properly, but in other scenarios where NRE maybe gets things wrong or misleads Raileasy or passengers using the engines to buy tickets?
Hahahaha
Fair enough mate, just thought I'd ask!
I sent this to the National Rail email address above:
That doesn't actually seem like a terribly unreasonable reply. This is a front line customer service staff member, presumably not part of the development team. In the email they've said they'll pass your feedback on to the relevant team and provided you with other options in the meantime. I'm not sure they could do too much more than this? Also with them being the official go-to source for such information rather than say a third party retailer who may only get a percent of the level of traffic the NRE website does, they are more likely to wait for a statistically significant amount of feedback to come in before changing things. I don't like the change, but I think that's close to the best email you could expect in response to be honest.
Not on my laptop it isn't! AI does have its uses, I got Gemini to iterate through a load of attempts until it finally came up with a script for the excellent "Tampermonkey" browser extension which completely erases the checkbox and its effects. The AI said they had used all sorts of trickery and obfuscation to stop you from removing the box, so none of the obvious ways worked but eventually it came up with a clever script that scans through the page to identify the relevant code, and although it's a fairly monster bit of code it doesn't cause any noticeable slowdown.
Hahaha
