I have to go to Birmingham tomorrow to pick up a van.
If I catch the train from Torquay to Birmingham New Street it will cost me £44.20
If I pop into work before I go in Exeter, and catch the train from there (same train by the way) then it will cost me £77.80
How does that work ? ❓

probably leaving before peak time?

I quite often buy a ticket from plymouth but get on at exeter.

public transport so obviously its as complex as possible and as expensive as they reckon they can get away with (given their mainly captive audience – anyone who has a choice has already opted for private transport)

eg. From bolton an off peak return ticket to manchester (10miles) is something like £3:90, bolton – darwen (9miles) single is £5:10
“Why?”
“well darwen is outside of greater manchester”
ignoring arguments about bolton’s location WTF does that have to do with out national rail network?

Sounds like the same thing you get on the east coast line- there’s allocations of tickets so if Edinburgh-London is in demand but Glasgow-London isn’t, Edinburgh-London gets more expensive- even though it’s the same train and Glasgow is a stop further.

In theory if you book the longer journey then take the shorter one (ie get off at Edinburgh) you’re liable for the higher ticket price. In practice ticket collectors always seem too embarassed.

In theory if you book the longer journey then take the shorter one (ie get off at Edinburgh) you’re liable for the higher ticket price.

which is total bollocks when a bit of common sense is applied. One thing that came as a surprise to me is off peak “clawback”.
After 9:30 is classed as off peak if the 07:40 train is delayed by 2 hours and you get on it at 09:40 with your off peak ticket you are going to get in trouble. Which presumably means if there is a big **** up that is backlogging all the trains you would have to sit at the station while the 7:40, 7:55, 8:10 etc etc trains come through until your official off peak train turns up a couple of hours later.
Grrrrrrr!

@jambo, careful with that, what you describe sometimes isn’t valid for Advance tickets. For example, buying a ticket from London to Cardiff, apparently it’s not valid if you get on at Reading. 🙄

@D0NK, disagree on “anyone who has a choice has already opted for private transport”. I would always use a train for a long journey if it’s practical. No traffic, less knackering, and you can chill and read your book/watch a film.

It’s **** up, simple as that. Exeter/Birmingham probably priced as business route so at a premium.

And those few short posts illustrate why folk just go by car. 😐

The fare from Torquay is more heavily subsidised than that from Exeter?

Or the industry systems that decide how to apportion your fare between the train operators running services that you could travel on shows that if you’re travelling from Torquay then you’ll travel on a specific service, whereas if you travel from Exeter then you have more of a choice of trains/routes. If you’re buying an open return, then you have a choice of routes/operators. There is an industry system that works out the likelihood of you travelling by different routes/operators and pays a portion of your ticket price to each operator based on that likelihood.

Given the likelihood that if youre travelling from Torquay to Birmingham you’re almost certainly going to travel with crosscountry trains, they might think ‘well, we get 100% of this fare, so we’ll encourage people to travel by charging less but get all of the fare’ whereas if you travel from Exeter they are thinking ‘well, we only get about 50% of this fare, so we’ll charge more because we don’t get all of it’.

See?

The OP problem is presumablybecause there’s an ammount of cheap tickets from either station, and the Exeter tickets sell out much sooner as more people use that train?

jambo, careful with that, what you describe sometimes isn’t valid for Advance tickets. For example, buying a ticket from London to Cardiff, apparently it’s not valid if you get on at Reading.

Buy a reading-earley/west reading/wherever ticket for a couple of quid to get through the barrier if it’s cheeper and if anyone asks say you were in the bogs when they checked tickets out of london?

@D0NK, disagree, I would always use a train for a long journey if it’s practical. No traffic, less knackering, and you can chill and read your book/watch a film.

While that’s a perk, it peeves me off that it’s still so expensive, especily when you offset that convenience against the inceonvenience of the station not being where you want to be, inflexible timetables etc.

Railways only work if you’re doing work on the train, in every other way cars are cheeper and better (unless you only get the train once a year). Which is daft when you consider they must be more fuel efficient, and even the newest trains are older than most peoples cars, and lots would get free road tax as classics if they were cars!

Given the likelihood that if youre travelling from Torquay to Birmingham you’re almost certainly going to travel with crosscountry trains, they might think ‘well, we get 100% of this fare, so we’ll encourage people to travel by charging less but get all of the fare’ whereas if you travel from Exeter they are thinking ‘well, we only get about 50% of this fare, so we’ll charge more because we don’t get all of it’.

See?

Yes, but no ?
The train is indeed a crosscountry train, but its the same one, and I have booked it in advance today. I am also going to buy a ticket to take me from Exeter St Davids to Exeter Central for £1 so that I can get onto the platform without being challenged by the barrier / man on the barrier.
Had a similar thing when I went to the o2 in London. I got off at the stop prior to the one I had bought my ticket for (again it was cheaper to go the longer distance). After 2 or 3 minutes of remonstrating with the guy at the tube, he saw he was not going to win and reluctantly opened the gate for me.

Railways only work if you’re doing work on the train, in every other way cars are cheeper and better (unless you only get the train once a year). Which is daft when you consider they must be more fuel efficient, and even the newest trains are older than most peoples cars, and lots would get free road tax as classics if they were cars!

As an induvidual, if I go from my parents place up by Bristol Parkway over to Cardiff, it costs about £12 off peak.
Now, I can not drive, get across the bridge, park in the centre for anywhere near that. Even with 2 of us, its pretty close……and I can have a couple of drinks…. 😆

antennae – Member
I would always use a train for a long journey if it’s practical.

me too, used to travel a lot by train and I much prefer it, will always choose it for the commute when resting from cycling, but when considering longer journeys I look at the cost, the timetable and the inconveniences of rail (including the lottery that is trying to take bikes) then I look at the car outside and think **** public transport. It’s just a bit crap really.

I’m hiring a van for a week’s touring in August, then heading to Cornwall to meet the folks.

Single train ticket Leeds – Truro = £180

Cost of van for one week, pick up Leeds, drop off Falmouth – £206

Whether you book online, by phone, in person or use a ticket machine, your journey details are entered and then they press this to determine the price

Firstly, technically your ticket will be invalid for the journey you are intending to make and so there is a possibility that the Train Manager (if he spots this and can be bothered and is enough of a jobsworth and knows that this cheaper fare is possible) could declare that you have to pay the difference.

However, you aren’t looking at this in the right way: Since you are buying an open ticket, there is no way of the industry knowing how you will use it – you have a choice. The thing is, if you get on at Torquay there is a much greater likelihood that you’ll do the entire journey on Crosscountry trains, so they will price accordingly. If you wanted, you could choose to make any variation of your journey by going via Salisbury, say. If you get on at Exeter there is a greater likelihood that you’ll travel by another operator, so the industry system doesn’t allocate the full price of the ticket to Crosscountry – the ticket price is therefore going to be higher because it gets shared amongst the operators who’s services you could have used.

You see, I like the trains. I accept that it sometimes costs more than the car but it means I can fall asleep/eat breakfast/work which I couldn’t do in the car. Saying that, my standard commute to work is cheaper by train, about £5 per week compared to the cost of fuel alone. What is odd is that to by a season ticket between the 2 locations costs £50 per week, a “West Midlands all zones + Leamington Spa” costs £42. Odd.

BlobOnAStick,

Ah, I understand what you are saying if it was an open ticket, but this one is train specific. I can not catch another train, with another operator. The cross country train I get on at Torquay, is the actual train that stops at St Davids , then goes onto Birmingham.
I just plan to get on at St Davids and trust the Train Manager is not bothered / I was in the toilet honest

Return to Brum from Sheffield: £86
Return to Chesterfield from Sheffield+Chesterfield to Brum: £40.10
Same train.

while we’re on the subject, looking at northen rail ticket
http://tickets.northernrail.org/tickets
is the standard off peak ticket the same price as going in on the day and buying from the ticket office?