National Routeing Guide



  • So, British rail has a National Routeing Guide (British spelling). The good news is, you won't always need it:

    But, if you do need it, God help you. First, you need to identify the nearest routeing points to your source and destination. Then, you look it up in this 1000+ page document:

    Notice that these codes don't describe routes per se... they describe maps. There are 600+ pages of maps:

    Okay, so, you can trace your way from one map to the next, but not all routes are appropriate:

    Then, in the unlikely case you figured something out, make sure that there aren't any active "easements" which prohibit it:

    And that, as they say, is that! Cheerio.



  •  Good grief. If it's this complicated in England, I can't imagine how bad it would be in a real-sized country.



  •  WHAT THE...??!!??

    not only did my head explode while trying at least to kind of understand what those... things are supposed to mean or explain, but... i don't even understand WHY they exist.

    what's that routeing "system" supposed to accomplish? is it for people who're unable to understand that if they want to get from A to C where no direct connection exists they have to first go from A to B (where B has a direct connection to C) and change trains?

    if yes, then... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DMSHvgaUWc8

    if not, then, WHAT THE FUCK is it supposed to do/solve again?



  • Does anybody actually use that, or does everybody just ignore it?

    Obligatory British train skit



  • BYOC: Build a system that determines an "appropriate" route from A to B via this monstrosity.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @fennec said:

    British spelling
    Erm - no. It's not. It may be ATOC's spelling, but the vast majority of the populace (who can spell) don't spell 'routing' that way.



    It's not as if the document makes much sense anyway. From the link above about criticisms of the Routeing Guide:

    Q: "What are the permitted routes where a ticket is routed 'not London'; in particular, what if the only route given in the Guide is [via] 'London'?

    A: In this case, you can use the ticket via London. The routes 'London' and 'not London' are not necessarily mutually exclusive."


  • Haha, holy shit, wow. Great post.



  • I'm British (note: "Routeing" is not a correct spelling in British English either), and have actually attempted to determine what the legal routes from one place to another are, via asking train station staff. None of them could explain to me how to determine whether the train route I wanted to use was legal or not (nor did they know of the existence of the document linked). So, I'll say that I've attempted to use it, but failed at the first hurdle of using it: determining its existence.

    Thanks very much to the OP for letting me know it exists. That said, I'm not sure I'm encouraged to actually try to use it, but I might once as a joke.

    For bonus points, try asking a train ticket salesman "can I buy a return ticket, then get off the train at a station other than the source or destination on the return leg, and later go from that station to my destination?". I haven't got a consistent answer yet, even though it's something I sometimes actually want to do. (I haven't risked it yet.)



  • @ais523 said:

    I'm British (note: "Routeing" is not a correct spelling in British English either), and have actually attempted to determine what the legal routes from one place to another are, via asking train station staff. None of them could explain to me how to determine whether the train route I wanted to use was legal or not (nor did they know of the existence of the document linked).

    Legal?

    You mean this document and process exists because it's literally illegal to ride certain train routes to get from point A to point B? ... surely there's some miscommunication here?


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @ais523 said:

    can I buy a [...] ticket, then get off the train at a station other than the source or destination [...]
    The generally accepted answer is no. Regardless of whether you're going to attempt to finish the journey as you suggested or not.



  • Of course it is illegal to take certain routes from A to B... For instance, take the route from London Central Station to London Outskirt. Not sure if they both have trainstations, but I do suppose these two locations are recognizable and not all that far apart from eachother.

    It's illegal to take the route from A (London Central Station) to B (London Outskirt) via C, Glasgow... You're supposed to take a direct route :)


  • Garbage Person

     Gee. It seems like some sort of computational device might help this process out. TRWTF is that your rail system has non-permissible routings. Let passengers book tickets for whatever fuckass roundabout backwards way they want - just charge them appropriately per leg. Or do it like airlines and only let them pick the origin and destination and you tell them what fucking trains to get on.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @blakeyrat said:

    You mean this document and process exists because it's literally illegal to ride certain train routes to get from point A to point B?
    Without a valid ticket, of course.

    surely there's some midcommunication here
    Well, quite. You may want to talk to your brain about it.


  • @blakeyrat said:

    @ais523 said:
    I'm British (note: "Routeing" is not a correct spelling in British English either), and have actually attempted to determine what the legal routes from one place to another are, via asking train station staff. None of them could explain to me how to determine whether the train route I wanted to use was legal or not (nor did they know of the existence of the document linked).

    Legal?

    You mean this document and process exists because it's literally illegal to ride certain train routes to get from point A to point B? ... surely there's some miscommunication here?

    My understanding is that it is illegal to use specific fares to ride certain train routes [i.e. a given ticket may be legal for going from A to B via C, but not via D ]



  • @Weng said:

    Let passengers book tickets for whatever fuckass roundabout backwards way they want - just charge them appropriately per leg. Or do it like airlines and only let them pick the origin and destination and you tell them what fucking trains to get on.

    ^- this

    What's the justification for having this uber-complex fare schedule... well period. But specifically that the customer has to make sense of instead of the railroad? How ass-backwards is that? The answer: All. All ass-backwards.

    @PJH said:

    surely there's some midcommunication here
    Well, quite. You may want to talk to your brain about it.

    Picking on a typo I fixed about 5 seconds after posting the message? Desperate much?

    @TheCPUWizard said:

    My understanding is that it is illegal to use specific fares to ride certain train routes [i.e. a given ticket may be legal for going from A to B via C, but not via D ]

    So there's a law to fix something that could easily be solved in the reservation system.



  • @PJH said:

    The routes 'London' and 'not London' are not necessarily mutually exclusive."

    enum { LONDON, NOT_LONDON, ROUTE_NOT_FOUND };

     



  • @SEMI-HYBRID code said:

    i don't even understand WHY they exist.

    They exist in order to support the unsupportable privatisation of our railways imposed by the Thatcher/Major Conservative government.  They are artificial devices constructed solely in order to award disguised monopoly powers to private owners, most of whom went on to give massively-well-paid sinecures to ex-ministers from that government.




  •  @fennec said:

     


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @ais523 said:

    I'm British (note: "Routeing" is not a correct spelling in British English either), and have actually attempted to determine what the legal routes from one place to another are, via asking train station staff. None of them could explain to me how to determine whether the train route I wanted to use was legal or not (nor did they know of the existence of the document linked). So, I'll say that I've attempted to use it, but failed at the first hurdle of using it: determining its existence.

    Thanks very much to the OP for letting me know it exists. That said, I'm not sure I'm encouraged to actually try to use it, but I might once as a joke.

    For bonus points, try asking a train ticket salesman "can I buy a return ticket, then get off the train at a station other than the source or destination on the return leg, and later go from that station to my destination?". I haven't got a consistent answer yet, even though it's something I sometimes actually want to do. (I haven't risked it yet.)

    I am almost positive I saw something a couple of years ago saying that you don't have the right to do that.



  • Just to let you know from a non english speaker...







    Maybe it's not used because the people is lazy and don't want to write the whole word? (Like colour, etc...)



  • @Weng said:

    Gee. It seems like some sort of computational device might help this process out. TRWTF is that your rail system has non-permissible routings.

    Think of it as a kind of load balancing with QoS. People can buy cheap tickets avoiding London or expensive tickets going through the most over-loaded stations.

    @Weng said:

    Let passengers book tickets for whatever fuckass roundabout backwards way they want - just charge them appropriately per leg.

    That's precisely what this system is attempting to accomplish.

    @blakeyrat said:

    @TheCPUWizard said:
    My understanding is that it is illegal to use specific fares to ride certain train routes [i.e. a given ticket may be legal for going from A to B via C, but not via D ]
    So there's a law to fix something that could easily be solved in the reservation system.

    There doesn't need to be a specific law about trains for it to be illegal to use a service without paying for it. And the suggestion that it should be necessary to reserve a seat is a major WTF in itself.

    @Khalin said:

    Just to let you know from a non english speaker...

    http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/route
    http://www.wordreference.com/definition/routeing

    Maybe it's not used because the people is lazy and don't want to write the whole word? (Like colour, etc...)

    English spelling is another WTF, and most words which end in -e lose it when forming a gerund.



  • @pjt33 said:

    @Weng said:

    Let passengers book tickets for whatever fuckass roundabout backwards way they want - just charge them appropriately per leg.

    That's precisely what this system is attempting to accomplish.

    Than why not just be specific about the route when buying the ticked ("this is a ticket from A to B via C, D, E and F", where A to F are names of specific stations), add up the distances and pay by that? They do it like that around here and it seems to work fine and does not need a huge manual. And not like it wouldn't be possible to do "QoS" with that too by making a kilometre (or are British railways exempt from metric system like road signs?) in the busy areas more expensive.


  • Garbage Person

    @pjt33 said:

    That's precisely what this system is attempting to accomplish.
    Except that this system is so convoluted that I am supremely confident that nobody has ever used it.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    And you people wonder why Americans like their cars...Just let the freight and the hobos ride the rails, like God intended.



  • @boomzilla said:

    And you people wonder why Americans like their cars...
     

    Because it's a far larger and generally less populated country. 'Car culture' causes the cars to be used in the densely populated as well, but eh, that's a side effect.

    Canadians love their cars even more.



  • @PJH said:

    @ais523 said:
    can I buy a [...] ticket, then get off the train at a station other than the source or destination [...]
    The generally accepted answer is no. Regardless of whether you're going to attempt to finish the journey as you suggested or not.
     

     Actually, the answer is "It depends". As you might expect in a system created by bureaucrats, it's not that simple. If you have an Anytime ticket, the answer is "Yes, you can". You can get on or off as much as you like, as long as you stick to a route in the routing guide, and can leave out the beginning, end, or any part of the middle of your journey.  If you've got an Advance ticket, the answer is "No, absolutely not" - it's valid for the journey on the ticket with no variations allowed.

    If you've got an Off-Peak or Super Off-Peak, then you need to consult the fares manual - another well-hidden and insanely complex document. In many cases, you can make part of your journey but only one part - once you leave you can't get back on. Otherwise the possible answers are "Yes" (as the Anytime) or "No" (as the Advance).



  • @Bulb said:

    @pjt33 said:

    @Weng said:

    Let passengers book tickets for whatever fuckass roundabout backwards way they want - just charge them appropriately per leg.

    That's precisely what this system is attempting to accomplish.

    Than why not just be specific about the route when buying the ticked ("this is a ticket from A to B via C, D, E and F", where A to F are names of specific stations), add up the distances and pay by that? They do it like that around here and it seems to work fine and does not need a huge manual. And not like it wouldn't be possible to do "QoS" with that too by making a kilometre (or are British railways exempt from metric system like road signs?) in the busy areas more expensive.

     

     

    That's what used to happen in the early days - there were only a few trains a day, so you knew what route you were taking. Nowadays there are lots of trains, so you might not know what route you're taking until you're on the platform.

    When it was all British Rail, tickets were valid "by any reasonable route" unless restricted (so you might get a cheaper "not via London" ticket, because the trains to London are full of people going to London). After all, it's all the same organisation and the money all goes in one pot. Then it was split up and privatised. There is still one ticket system, but lots of companies running trains, so the money needs to be split. A very complex computer system named ORCATS was created to decide who gets how much from each ticket. In order to do this, it needs to know exactly which trains you can use each ticket on - "reasonable route" won't do. So "permitted routes" were created - a book that lists all the ways to go from A to B for every possible A and B in the country. Feed that data to ORCATS, along with the timetable and train capacities, and the ticket database, and it works out how many people should be on each train, and hence who takes what share of the money.

     Now, being programmers, I'm sure that writing a manual that lists all the ways from A to B in a usable and unambiguous format wouldn't be beyond us. Unfortunately the book that was created is diffcult to use and frequently ambiguous. Fortunately, most of the time it agrees with common sense and you don't need to look at it - and most people don't.

     

     

     



  •  Indeed, I wanted to make a journey the other week where I stopped off on the way back (the technical term for it is "break of journey"), but on one of the tickets I was considering getting, I wasn't sure if this was permitted.

     So I asked a friend who works for the train company in question to check for me. He found documentation that in the same paragraph declared that it both was and was not permitted on that ticket.



  • @SteelCamel said:

    It depends
     

    This thread is now making me twitch from all the The Guide-like insanity.



  • @moogal said:

    He found documentation that in the same paragraph declared that it both was and was not permitted on that ticket.
     

    We've always been at war with Eurasia.



  • @dhromed said:

    @SteelCamel said:

    It depends
     

    This thread is now making me twitch from all the The Guide-like insanity.

    Don't panic...

    @dhromed said:

    @moogal said:

    He found documentation that in the same paragraph declared that it both was and was not permitted on that ticket.
     

    We've always been at war with Eurasia.

    I sold you, and you sold me...



  • @dhromed said:

    Canadians love their cars even more.

    Yes but Canadians invariably have crappier cars. Much like "what is the Mona Lisa smiling at?" this is a mystery that will never be solved.

    @Bulb said:

    Than why not just be specific about the route when buying the ticked ("this is a ticket from A to B via C, D, E and F", where A to F are names of specific stations), add up the distances and pay by that? They do it like that around here and it seems to work fine and does not need a huge manual. And not like it wouldn't be possible to do "QoS" with that too by making a kilometre (or are British railways exempt from metric system like road signs?) in the busy areas more expensive.

    Or a simple zone system. Put London in a different zone, and charge by how many zones the passenger travels through.

    @Bulb said:

    (or are British railways exempt from metric system like road signs?) in the busy areas more expensive.

    But... but British people always make fun of us Americans for not using the metric system! Say it ain't so, British people!


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @blakeyrat said:

    @PJH said:
    surely there's some midcommunication here
    Well, quite. You may want to talk to your brain about it.

    Picking on a typo I fixed about 5 seconds after posting the message? Desperate much?

    Just the sort of thing you do all the time. Problem?



  • @SteelCamel said:

    @PJH said:

    @ais523 said:
    can I buy a [...] ticket, then get off the train at a station other than the source or destination [...]
    The generally accepted answer is no. Regardless of whether you're going to attempt to finish the journey as you suggested or not.
     

     Actually, the answer is "It depends". As you might expect in a system created by bureaucrats, it's not that simple. If you have an Anytime ticket, the answer is "Yes, you can". You can get on or off as much as you like, as long as you stick to a route in the routing guide, and can leave out the beginning, end, or any part of the middle of your journey.  If you've got an Advance ticket, the answer is "No, absolutely not" - it's valid for the journey on the ticket with no variations allowed.

    If you've got an Off-Peak or Super Off-Peak, then you need to consult the fares manual - another well-hidden and insanely complex document. In many cases, you can make part of your journey but only one part - once you leave you can't get back on. Otherwise the possible answers are "Yes" (as the Anytime) or "No" (as the Advance).

    Thanks; believe it or not, that answer was actually genuinely useful. (Do you know where the fares manual is? ATOC's website didn't but mentioned National Rail's, which suggested that I go looking for it in the "Bargain transporation collectables" section of eBay. I typically travel on off-peak tickets. Or just give up and use the bus.)

    Anyway, for a laugh, I decided to actually make a computation with the fares guide. Seems it's legal to go from Birmingham to Cambridge via Loughborough, although there's no obvious reason why anyone would want to do that (it's not on the route), unless you could get off the train midway in Loughborough.

    I also think that it's theoretically possible to end up with two stations that it's illegal to travel between via any route at all, without a specific exception making it legal to do so (or just relying on the "if it's the shortest route you don't need to use the manual" exemption, which takes all the fun out of things). Also, this would fluctuate based on the train prices, just to make things even more complex; it's possible for it to be legal one day and illegal another.



  • You ain't seen nothing yet: look at the [url=http://www.rossrail.co.uk/central/routeqn1.html]Amazing Routeing Question[/url].

    The question is simple: what ticket should you buy to travel from London to Inverness ? The answer seems to be less simple: London to Carlisle.

    Carlisle?

    Well, yes. Valid routes for tickets are determined by something called the ATOC Routeing Guide. For every possible pair of stations this tells you what routes are valid. And it appears that a valid route from London to Carlisle is to start at King's Cross, ride up the ECML via Edinburgh and Aberdeen to Inverness, then back down via Aviemore and Stirling to pick up the WCML.

    Feeling somewhat flummoxed, RossRail ticket expert Clive Feather wrote to ATOC. Here's his letter:

    (For those not from the UK, Inverness is quite far north in Scotland, and Carlisle is about 200 miles south of it, across the border in England.)

    I can at a pinch manage to navigate the Routeing Guide. Learning how to do so was useful for my job. I'm still always nervous when attempting to travel on something that should be valid but is unusual. It's all too easy for a ticket collector to be unaware of the specifics of the route you're trying to use, especially as they don't like you trying to save money by splitting a journey onto multiple tickets (which is legit but the train companies wish it wasn't!).

    I was travelling to Penzance (southwest tip of England) last month, from Coventry (about in the middle), which is about a 7 hour trip. I wanted to meet my friend in London on the way there, but when returning go back via a more direct route. Any ticket Coventry -> Penzance is not valid via London (you can either go via Birmingham or via Reading), and if I bought Cov->London and London->Penzance as separate tickets, I'd have to travel via London on the way back. However, a friend of mine came up with an ingenious route, where I would buy Coventry->Leamington, Leamington->Bicester North and Bicester North->Penzance. The trick was that a Bicester North to Penzance ticket is valid either via London or not. The cunning thing was that no train in my plan would have passed through or stopped at Bicester North, but another rule allows anyone holding a Bicester North ticket to pass through Banbury instead, so all I had to do was make sure I was on something that stopped at Banbury.

    I didn't do that plan in the end, as it turned out I didn't need to go to London after all, but it's a good example of how understanding the routeing guide is useful but incredibly hard!



  • @ais523 said:

    note: "Routeing" is not a correct spelling in British English either

    OED says otherwise:

    @oed said:

    route, v.
    Pronunciation:
    Brit. /ruːt/ , U.S. /rut/ , /raʊt/
    Inflections: Present participle routing, routeing.

    Also, on the break of journey question, what's never mentioned (to my knowledge) is the option to get a supplementary ticket for the double-back portion. I.e. Get an advance ticket from (for the sake of example) London Terminus to Edinburgh terminus, and a second ticket from Edinburgh terminus to Edinburgh outskirts, then alight at Edinburgh outskirts. Sure the journey takes less time than should conceivably be allowed, but in all other respects it seems to be the least problematic option (presuming that you have a ticket that doesn't allow break of journey).



  • @ais523 said:

    (Do you know where the fares manual is? ATOC's website didn't but mentioned National Rail's, which suggested that I go looking for it in the "Bargain transporation collectables" section of eBay. I typically travel on off-peak tickets. Or just give up and use the bus.)

    I don't think it's freely available. It [url=http://www.atoc.org/clientfiles/File/RSP%20Licence%20Fee%20&%20Datafeeds%20Charge%20FY2011-12%20v01-00.pdf]seems to be[/url] £400 for the fares and routeing data for evaluation purposes.



  • @PJH said:

    @blakeyrat said:
    @PJH said:
    surely there's some midcommunication here
    Well, quite. You may want to talk to your brain about it.

    Picking on a typo I fixed about 5 seconds after posting the message? Desperate much?

    Just the sort of thing you do all the time. Problem?

    Fix typos? Is fixing typos something bad or wrong? Or badong?

    From now on I will do the opposite of fixing typos: gnodab!

    On topic:
    1) "reservation system" doesn't necessarily imply reserving seats in advance-- if you buy a same-day ticket from an airline, it still goes through their reservation system.
    2) has anybody ever calculated how much of an economic drain this "system" is? I mean, you guys ride trains a lot...
    3) do ticket checkers actually understand the system better than the average person? Do they like lock them in a room for a week with this manual until they have it memorized? Or is this law pretty much utterly ignored by both the traveling public and the ticket checkers?



  • @blakeyrat said:

    Legal?

    You mean this document and process exists because it's literally illegal to ride certain train routes to get from point A to point B? ... surely there's some miscommunication here?

    No miscommunication. I used to think that this was a use of illegal in the sense of "illegal syntax", but no. British railways have a number of bylaws that make it a crime in itself (rather than being theft of service, breach of contract, or something) to do things like transfer your ticket, or travel without a valid ticket. This is ultimately enforced, not by the Kent Police or whoever, but by the British Transport Police who you do see every so often on the trains.



  • @SEMI-HYBRID code said:

    what's that routeing "system" supposed to accomplish? is it for people who're unable to understand that if they want to get from A to C where no direct connection exists they have to first go from A to B (where B has a direct connection to C) and change trains?

    No. The underlying cause is what DaveK said. British Rail, a nationally owned company, ran the railways in Britain from long before I was born until the late eighties, if memory serves. They had a rep for being always late and staffed by rude, unhelpful buggers. To fix this, the then-government decided to privatise the railways, which was the cure-all at the time. They proceeded to divide the network into a number of non-overlapping sub-networks and sell each off to a privately-owned monopoly. This, of course, solved nothing, but did make the problems not the government's fault anymore. Crappy service is what the market wants!

    The proximate cause is that tickets to travel to/from large cities tend to be much more expensive (for example, the wife and I travel similar distances in opposite directions to work, but I go to London so my ticket is about double what hers is). The network permits you to travel around said cities to avoid them, and these routes would be cheaper - probably slower, but that's the trade off. Or, at least, it would be the trade off if the train companies hadn't decided that too many people would take the cheaper option so made them illegal journeys. So the problem this solves is "customers would like to do things that are not optimal for our bottom line".


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @blakeyrat said:

    @PJH said:
    @blakeyrat said:
    @PJH said:
    surely there's some midcommunication here
    Well, quite. You may want to talk to your brain about it.

    Picking on a typo I fixed about 5 seconds after posting the message? Desperate much?

    Just the sort of thing you do all the time. Problem?

    Fix typos?

    No. Pick up on minor irrelevances and make a big thing of them.



    And deliberately misunderstanding things of course. Which you've just done again. You just can't help yourself can you?



  • As a British train geek, I love the routeing guide! Especially when it allows you to travel from the West Midlands to the East Midlands via South Wales, or from the East Midlands to North Wales via a myriad different routes through the North West... Lot's of "fun" possibilities when you look at it closely :D



  • @blakeyrat said:

    1) "reservation system" doesn't necessarily imply reserving seats in advance-- if you buy a same-day ticket from an airline, it still goes through their reservation system.
     

    It's still in advance. You have  to decide which flight you're travelling on when you buy the ticket. With British trains you can reserve a seat on a specific train when you buy your ticket if you want, but you can also leave yourself some flexibility to change your mind about which route to take partway through your journey. So if one line has problems (lorry hit a bridge, would-be suicide, wrong type of leaves, etc.) you can sometimes change your plans without having to buy a new ticket. Or if you're going through London you don't have to decide between the risk of missing your train or the risk of having to entertain yourself in the station because the Tube didn't have problems and you got there before the train before yours left.



  • @pjt33 said:

    It's still in advance. You have  to decide which flight you're travelling on when you buy the ticket. With British trains you can reserve a seat on a specific train when you buy your ticket if you want, but you can also leave yourself some flexibility to change your mind about which route to take partway through your journey. So if one line has problems (lorry hit a bridge, would-be suicide, wrong type of leaves, etc.) you can sometimes change your plans without having to buy a new ticket. Or if you're going through London you don't have to decide between the risk of missing your train or the risk of having to entertain yourself in the station because the Tube didn't have problems and you got there before the train before yours left.

    Yeah, but... in the time it takes you to break out the guide and figure out whether your re-route is legal or not, you'd miss 5 trains.



  • Tell me there's an app for this and that they don't expect normal people to trudge through a fuck 1000+ page PDF document, right?  Right?



  • @Sock Puppet 5 said:

     Good grief. If it's this complicated in England, I can't imagine how bad it would be in a real-sized country.

    Ah! In America, we have mostly solved this problem: outside of a few exceptional regions, Amtrak is simply completely useless for any real travel!



  • @C-Octothorpe said:

    Tell me there's an app for this and that they don't expect normal people to trudge through a fuck 1000+ page PDF document, right?  Right?

    Nope, you're meant to ask the guy at the ticket office when you're buying your ticket.  Unfortunately 1) they are increasingly closing ticket offices and expecting people to buy tickets from self-service ticket machines and 2) even when there is a ticket office the staff generally can't make any more sense of the rules than anyone else and frequently give wrong, incomplete or suboptimal (i.e. overpriced) answers to those sorts of questions.




  • @PJH said:

    @fennec said:
    British spelling
    Erm - no. It's not. It may be ATOC's spelling, but the vast majority of the populace (who can spell) don't spell 'routing' that way.
    Apparently "routing" means something else (though given this guide, it would probably still be appropriate).



  • @C-Octothorpe said:

    Tell me there's an app for this and that they don't expect normal people to trudge through a fuck 1000+ page PDF document, right?  Right?

    I've been considering writing something… what sort of thing would you find most useful: "I have this ticket, is it valid on this set of trains?", "I have this ticket, give me a selection of different routes I could go", "I want to get from here to here, what is the cheapest way to do that?" or "I want to get from here to here, what are my options?".



  • @C-Octothorpe said:

    Tell me there's an app for this and that they don't expect normal people to trudge through a fuck 1000+ page PDF document, right?  Right?

    Bear in mind that it's pretty much only train geeks who'd be interested, plus a vanishingly small minority of people with genuinely unusual travel needs/wants. 99.99% of journeys - number pulled from my ass, probably significantly higher - won't need to refer to the routeing guide because they're either direct - one train, no changes - or via the shortest possible route. Basically, the routeing guide is usually only needed to answer a question about routeing where the first response is likely to be 'WTF would you want to do that in the first place?'


Log in to reply