On 01/05/2014 10:49, Roland Perry wrote:
In message , at 10:07:24 on Thu, 1 May
2014, Someone Somewhere remarked:

That's because the £3 is the tube fare from Paddington to Waterloo, and
the journey planner is only showing the fastest routes. It's £31.50 to
Waterloo from Bath, change at Reading or Salisbury, if you specify "via
Clapham Junction" to show the slower trains.

Aha - thanks.


However, that's not what I came here to post about - given the tube
strike, my uncertainty of routing and my inability to find/see large
pink Oyster routing indicators I thought I would be cunning and look
at the price of a ticket straight to Shadwell as it's technically a
National Rail station. The quoted off-peak price? £58.00.

Super off peak.

Yes - unless you hover over the fare, nationalrail.co.uk only specifies
it as "Off-peak" but I now see it that it's a super off-peak.

I'm not normally one to get het up about petty price disputes, but
even I have to admit that £26.50 for a Z1-2 single seems a little
steep....

The difference is a result of the single to Shadwell only being £1 less
than the £59 return, whereas the single to Paddington is [much closer
to] half the price of the £55[1] return.

So this is a result, I presume, of FGW setting BTH-PAD and some other
op-co setting the price of BTH-SDE. I know that a few years back FGW
changed from off-peak singles being returns minus £1 to a more
reasonable value, so presumably someone else hasn't, even though 90%
plus of the journey is actually on FGW?

So based on the majority of ticket prices nationally, the anomaly is
actually how cheap the single to Paddington is.

For some measure of cheap of course! The peak single to get there the
day before was an eye-watering £93ish though, so certainly cheap in
comparison.

Obviously something to watch out for when buying singles - the
opportunity to save money by splitting according to the possibility of
"x/2" vs "x-£1" rates for singles on different legs.

[1] With the cross-London portion of the return thus being £4.
Got you - I thought I knew this stuff, but there's further
complications. One of those of course is trying to buy long distance
rail tickets from Overground stations who can sell them, but seem to
have little practice in doing so....