London Banter - View Single Post - Through ticketing from tube to rail [part 2]

[email protected] · March 1st 10, 11:45 PM posted to uk.transport.london

In article , (Roland
Perry) wrote:

In message
,
at 01:59:38 on Mon, 1 Mar 2010, NM remarked:
The problem is that the AP ticket for that journey is valid either
for VT only (yes, I don't know how you are supposed to do the tails)
or "EastCoast and Connections". So you'd be travelling from Kings
Cross in any case.

FFS, you need to go to college now to buy a train ticket, WTF is it so
complex?

Because people apparently want to pay less than the Anytime fare,
if they can.

And to protect the revenue from walk-up tickets, that means putting
some kind of restriction on the cheaper tickets.

Restricting them to one ToC, and one named service, is a prime
candidate. The problem then, is that some journeys require the use
of more than one ToC - so they invent a ticket "with connections"
(onto a different ToC) at one or other end.

To try to keep things simpler (probably the reason) they don't
offer every possible combination of such tickets, so sometimes
you'll find that a longer trip such as London to Glasgow can only
be done on the major routings like ECML and WCML, rather than also
up the Midland mainline and via Sheffield/Leeds etc. (or even more
obscure routes).

The problem is lack of consistency. "and connections" covers far more
options with Virgin than with Cross Country for a start.

--
Colin Rosenstiel