Why am I so stupid? Train fares again

[jack]

It seems the fares the journey planner website displays are limited by the other journeys listed in the same query. As far as I can tell, return-off-peak and day-return-off-peak are valid on slightly different times of day, but there's no way to ask (either an English language terms-and-conditions, or a lookup query) which trains a certain ticket is valid on, the only option is to try those routes and see if a ticket with the same name is available or not.

I know I shouldn't be surprised any more, but I always feel so incredibly wool-headed when someone is yelling at me that I urgently need "foo" but they refuse to tell me anything about what foo is or what it costs.

Comments

[liv]

Bah, it's not you that's stupid, it's that train fares are a confusocracy in a big way. There's tension between the government putting pressure on them to have affordable fares, and their shareholders putting pressure on them to make as much money as possible. So they reconcile the two by having affordable fares, but you need to know the sekrit magic formula to be able to find them, whereas most normal fares that are convenient for people to buy are horribly expensive.

Searchable electronic databases for booking train tickets are great, but I really hate the way that it's not possible to see all the options side-by-side and make a decision based on all the information. OK, I'm glad that I don't have to trek to the train station during a two-hour window in the middle of the working day to be able to plan a journey, but I really want the complete information available in a human-readable form! But I suspect that not providing even a full timetable (rather than a "search for trains in this 4 hour slot") is part of a deliberate strategy to make it near-impossible to actually buy the cheap tickets.