In message , at 19:17:25 on Wed, 24 Jul
2013, Charles Lindsey remarked:
I'm 99.9% sure of this, but after advising a friend about ticketing who
is highly doubtful of my advice, I've stupidly allowed 0.1% of doubt to
creep in, so as a belt-and-braces measure I thought I'd just quickly check here.

If one buy an Anytime single ticket from A to C, one can travel A to B in
the morning, go and do a day's work (or indeed go and 'do' a day's fun
etc), then travel from B to C in the evening and go home (or go to the circus etc).

Yes. The one exception is that if B is a Tube station when crossing London
as part of the ticket, you have to pay for the extra Tube trip from B to
the relevant London terminal to continue.

Well that's not what the ticket clerk at our local station told me when I
asked whether I could book a ticket from Manchester to Reading via London,
and then break my journey for an afternoon at Bletchley.

He said break of journey was only allowed if you claimed to be too ill to
proceed without the break. Emphasis on the word "claimed".

What nonsense. Where do they get these people from?

Getting back to the overnight BoJ (because the journey is impossible to
complete) there's a degree of interpretation in that I suppose.

Here's a real example: Sheffield to Liverpool St via Ely (which is a
permitted route).

The last train from Ely to Liverpool St is the 22.15, change Cambridge,
arriving 00:18, which might be a bit late for some people - depending on
where they were planning on sleeping overnight.

The last train (on which a through ticket is valid) from Sheffield to
Ely arrives at 22:11, so it could be argued that you should never have
to "overnight" at Ely.

Modulo the minimum interchange time which seems to have gone AWOL from
the National Rail site, but is unlikely to be as little as 4 minutes I'd
have thought.

[Although of course, these two trains used to be a guaranteed
connection, because both being run by Central they swapped crew at Ely,
so that the Norwich crew from the train bound for Cambridge would have
taken the ex-Liverpool/Sheffield train onwards to Norwich, and the
Liverpool/Sheffield train's crew would have finished their shift with a
short hop to Cambridge.]
--
Roland Perry