Upgrading/Excessing a Single eTicket to a Day Return - Naive question.

[JamesM]

Apologies if this is a highly simple, silly question - I sort of have this vague recollection of if you bought a single ticket you could upgrade it to a return by paying an excess. So my friend is going from Bloxwich to Stafford as a day trip; and has bought a single fare for £9.50 digitally - but of course a return is £9.60; for whatever reason they thought they just had to buy two singles.
They've not bought the return portion, but will be returning the same day (tomorrow).

Is there any sort of way you can excess this, pay the extra 10p or whatever - I just have this vague memory that it was fine, you just show up at the ticket office etc but that might have been 1998 and before the world of e tickets and so on.
Many thanks for any help - this is the place to ask these questions!

 

[Hadders]

In theory a ticket office should be able to excess it, however this sort of excess is often difficult to obtain, and there is no contractual right to a ‘single to return’ excess.

We had a similar discussion a few days ago.

Northern refusing to excess

This morning I got on a Northern train at an ustaffed station. I bought a ticket from the ticket vending machine but accidentally bought a single rather than a return. I tried the help button on the machine but no luck. When the train I spoke to the guard and mentioned I would need my ticket...

www.railforums.co.uk

 

[Watershed]

There's no legal entitlement to such an excess.

The fact that it was bought as an eTicket wouldn't change the ability to excess it from a theoretical standpoint - either the TIS (ticket issuing system) allows single-to-return excesses or it doesn't, and there are procedures to enter the relevant details of an excess.

However even where a TIS is capable of such excesses, some staff may be unwilling to issue it because they don't know how to do so, or because they wrongly think that eTickets can't be excessed. I've heard all sorts of excuses, even for things like change of route excesses that you are entitled to.

So to answer your question - it is possible in some cases, but you are far from guaranteed to be able to do it.