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

[verazea]

Have a look at http://tickets.londonmidland.com/lm/en/JourneyPlanning/MixingDeck

Is fairly useful, in terms of working out ticket options, times and routes. If you don't enter specific times you can look at the times various tickets are valid for, and in the case of advanced singles what price each available train is. It also allows you to choose other routes, through an option on the left hand sidebar. I think this mostly does what you want?

It's not perfect, however as for some cheap routes you need to get the start and end station right. In the case of a city with many stations like London, some of the possible routes may not go to the station you expect so you might need to experiment. But then I am someone who will take the route with 3 changes that takes twice as long just because I can :)

If there's a better interface for playing with train routes and fares, someone please point me at it!

[verazea]

Something I forgot to mention is that if you want to go earlier or later than is shown, you can scroll up and down the list of trains and it will load earlier or later trains. This wasn't immediately obvious (to me) if the box with trains isn't full - if it only shows 3 trains but you want to see if there's an earlier one, scroll up and it will try to find earlier ones valid for your selected fare.