In message , at
21:18:38 on Sat, 26 Apr 2014, Arthur Figgis
remarked:
Surely it's time that train operators were required to offer passengers the
cheapest fares, allowing for options like this and have done with it?

Because only tight-fisted anoraks would do (say) Cambridge - London via
Ipswich, splitting tickets at every halt, arriving a fortnight on
Tuesday but saving 5p on the direct train which is just about to
depart. But somebody somewhere would no doubt complain if the ticket
clerk didn't do the calculations at 7.30am on a Monday.

Selling the cheapest A-Z ticket is a lot easier than than crunching
through every intermediate option vis B, C, D etc.

But the splits are often "obvious". If the passenger is getting a train
on a 1tph route, and has asked to leave at (say) 8.30am [they are likely
to have been asked this already] then splitting the tickets peak/offpeak
at a station a little over half an hour away is pretty straightforward.

I think people should be very careful what they wish for - eg would we
happy to lose "any reasonable" route in its fossilised "any permitted"
form in favour of tightly nailed-downing routings, which might be
likely to follow any crackdown on the ability to save by splitting
tickets?

While splitting tickets does nail down one of the points en-route, it
doesn't always introduce a routing inflexibility. From Great Anglia
territory, for example, all "not London" route to the Midlands and
beyond go via Peterborough. So splitting tickets there is not going to
be a problem.

Would we want the industry to lose the ability to fiddle around with
fares to try to grow specific markets?

That's a more significant issue, although sometimes these "specific
markets" don't seem to make a lot so sense. For example from Cambridge
to Birmingham by XC there's often a draught of AP tickets, but splitting
them at Peterborough then releases a pair of tickets on the self same
train, Cambridge to Peterborough, then Peterborough-Birmingham.
--
Roland Perry