On 10 Jan, 00:17, Michael Hoffman wrote:
Have relatives in Guildford, and would like to visit more often. A
cheap day return is £11.50. But looking at megabus.com I can get a
train ticket for Portsmouth which stops at Guildford on the way. Is
there anything stopping me from booking with megabus far in advance
and getting the ticket for £2 return and using it to get to Guildford
and back again?

It's disallowed under the rules.

However, it would be perfectly legitimate for you to also purchase a
£3.30 CDR from Woking to Guildford before boarding the train at
Waterloo (all London - Guildford - Portsmouth trains stop at Woking,
barring weird engineering chaos), and use that to escape the
station... this way, there is no part of your journey that isn't
covered by a valid ticket, just some parts that are double-covered.

I wouldn't recommend trying this. The railways regularly manage to catch
people who do things like buy Woking-Guildford tickets when they started
at London. If you get caught in one of those stings, then they'd want to
see that you have a valid ticket London-Woking. You don't.

The railways catch people who buy Woking-Guildford tickets when they
started at London by carrying out ticket checks between London and
Woking. At which point, our man has a perfectly valid Megatrain
ticket.

--
John Band
john at johnband dot org
www.johnband.org