Great Western Coffee Shop

Just spotted this on Twitter, posted by a South West Trains guard.

10 Brucey bonus points to the first person who can tell me what's wrong with this ticket.

https://twitter.com/Suburban_Guard/status/278923461244641280

The 72 hour day  ;D

Exactly!  It looks like they've cut out the 12 from another ticket and glued it over the date on a day ticket.  Not very clever.

Rather old now ... but what's odd about this one?

(http://www.wellho.net/pix/headscratcher.jpg)

Weekend first on a Tuesday?

There was a train from melksham?

Pilning only has one train/week in each direction on a Saturday - not normally a 1st carriage either.  How does a ticket like this get printed?

There's first class available for part of the route - Chippenham to Filton Abbey Wood - so a first class ticket is valid. That's just as you can buy a first class Melksham to London ticket, but the only first you'll get on that TransWilts leg is going to be declassified on those occasions when there's an SWT unit from Salisbury on the service.   But ... something went askew with the ticket machine that morning, and I got issued with this ticket (getting off short, at Patchway, no difference in price) and on querying it I also got an upgrade to a standard class travel ticket for the same journey.   Ticket inspector checked my tickets just after Temple Meads - no comment at all, so presumably such tickets are non uncommon enough to raise an eyebrow.

Now one of the big surprises about the Melksham service is that is sometimes usable for longer distance business trips outwards from the town.   The example / ticket here was to do a full day's work in the Filton area and the timing was idea for me, and over the past couple of months I've made a couple of other long distance trips in the same way, with more planned next week. I'm not alone in that either - even at 06:35 in the morning there are usually half a dozen people waiting for the Southampton train to appear ... and when it does, it's already got more people than that on from Chippenham.

Where this becomes less useful is in terms of return journeys (many of us return by bus ... which means arriving in Westbury, 7 miles up the road, over an hour before we get home), and in terms of cost.   I've had a day return trip priced at 110.00 and another at 174.00 over the past few weeks, which were cut to around 30 pounds and 84 pounds by "splitting"; frankly, 174 pounds prices people off the train and not everyone knows to split - they'll travel by train once, be horrified at the price, and never use it again.

Is that 'respectively' Graham, I mean 110 to 30 and 174 to 84?

Yes, it is.  From Melksham, we've got a dichotomy of very cheap (too cheap) local fares and very expensive (too expensive) long distance fares.