Thanks - as you supposed, I don't use a season ticket. It's still a bit confusing, though, as there seem to be four different types of service from Paddington to Reading:

1. The 125s that carry on to the west or southwest, taking about 25 minutes - plainly they count as HST^▸ (High Speed Train (Inter City class 43 125 units)), from what you said
2. The services to Oxford that also stop at Slough (e.g. the 2048), taking about 33 minutes
3. Services terminating at Reading with one or two stops like Maidenhead and Twyford (e.g. the 2018), taking about 42 minutes
4. The services that take about an hour and stop everywhere - plainly these are LTV^▸ (London [and] Thames Valley) ones, and I'd never use them if the others were running

The question is, what do 2 and 3 count as?

Should the information - confusing though it may be - not also be available online?

But my point was that, going by what their policy said, that isn't the case.

For example: 45 minutes delay on HST^▸ (High Speed Train (Inter City class 43 125 units)) - no compensation, but 45 minutes delay on LTV^▸ (London [and] Thames Valley) - 50% compensation.

That gets tricky if you intended to travel on one service, but took another because the first was delayed or cancelled - or if they happened to run a 125 on a service to Oxford that probably wouldn't have used such a train but for service disruptions. Surely compensation should be by route travelled and nothing more? In the case of a single journey, it's impossible to prove which train you travelled on anyway, since the ticket barriers at Reading swallow the ticket if that's your final destination.

I notice that Great Western offer compensation on a different basis for "High Speed services" and "London-Thames Valley services" (they also quote performance figures separately) but nowhere can I see a definition of these. Specifically, which does a journey between Paddington and Reading count as, since (with anything but an advance ticket) you can use any train that happens to stop at Reading?

Hi, if you have a ticket valid "via London", which covers the underground between the respective London termini (e.g. Paddington and Victoria), can you use it to travel from one of those points to some other intermediate station, for example if you want to spend some time in London? Obviously you'd need to pay for a ticket to complete the journey across London, but that would mean buying one ticket rather than two.

Thanks, that seems much more sensible. Can't understand why they can't/won't fix it, though; anyone from FGW^▸ (First Great Western) care to comment?

Hi, can anyone explain this, please. If I ask the journey planner for a day return trip from Reading to Paddington on a weekday, with the outward journey around 1700-1800 and the return after 2100, with a Senior Railcard (though I don't think that matters), I would expect that all trains would be at the "off peak day return" fare but they aren't: of the fast trains, the 1657, 1751 and 1756 are quoted at the "anytime" fare of ^28.05 and the 1727 at an "off peak return" fare of ^17.25, whereas all the others, earlier and later, are at an "off peak day return" fare of ^11.70. (These are just the faster trains, but a few of the slower ones are also shown at the higher fare.) However, the information given in the validity code for the ^11.70 fare (C7) just says that the outward journey must arrive in London after 1000, which of course all these trains do. So I can't see why it should cost that much more to use an apparently random selection of trains.

Thanks - I'd forgotten about the online discount.

I have a journey booked on Eurostar and so need to buy connecting tickets from Reading. The advice (from Seat 61 and elsewhere) is generally to buy tickets to "London International (LNE)" as these have the international conditions of carriage, but ticket sale websites seem very confusing when it comes to booking these:

* National Rail, First Great Western, The Train Line, My Train Ticket, Red Spotted Hanky and Take The Train don't mention them (or indeed the destination) at all; some of these have two codes for St Pancras (STP and SPX) but don't show any services to the latter.

* Rail Easy shows the tickets, priced at ^30 return

* Quno shows the tickets at the same price ("anytime return") but confusingly shows an "off peak return" that costs more, the only apparent difference being that it's valid on any route, whereas the ^30 ones are only valid via Slough. But why should anyone pay more to travel on the slower service (via Waterloo rather than Paddington), and why isn't there an "anytime" ticket on that route (or an "off peak" one on the Paddington route, for that matter)?

Can anyone confirm that these tickets really exist, and that the ticket offices will know about them if I try to buy one in person, please? And how come they're so expensive - the last time I bought them (admittedly a few years ago), the cost was only ^16, and I don't think prices in general have doubled since then. It seems a bit much when the cost of getting to London is about half the cost of the journey from London to Paris/Brussels! And from Brussels it's only ^12 return to travel on to anywhere in Belgium!

I have some Rail Travel Vouchers (issued by National Express East Anglia) which say they are valid on "services of the principal Train Companies". Does anyone know whether this includes the Reading to Heathrow Railair coach service, please?