Loading & ticketing. Suppress travel by making it *** to book with confidence

[whole diary]

[brooklea]

It is worth commenting that BRI^» (Bristol Temple Meads - next trains)-WSB^» (Westbury - next trains)-WEY journeys have never (in living memory?) actually offered seats for reservation. Does this mean they have now been introduced - or just that one cannot in fact reserve such?

Reservations are compulsory on GWR^▸ (Great Western Railway) services to/from Weymouth (this information is shown on realtimetrains.co.uk, which derives it’s information from official data feeds, so I assume that is what is uploaded in the Journey Planner systems).

Unfortunately, GWR’s services to/from Weymouth do not offer seat reservations.

The only possible explanation I can come up with is that no-one is to use these services....

[brooklea]

Edit to add

Trying to book on the 10:05 from Melksham gives

Sorry, we couldn’t reserve your seat(s). We recommend that you choose a different service.

Gone from not running to full remarkably quickly!

... next service 14:05 .... 15:51 in Weymouth and I could get the 16:10 back ...

You’ll need a reservation for that 1405 mind grahame

And if you manage that, you could have two hours in Weymouth and come back on the 1753 (so long as you make a reservation!), with the ‘bonus’ of a 48 minute stop-over at Westbury (or Trowbridge if you prefer). You could even spend time at both if you so desired.

But best of all, no reservation required (or available) on the 2021 from Westbury to Melksham 

It definitely feels as if an attempt is being made to discourage travel to and from Weymouth.

[rogerw]

Despite what the official line is, I am sure that the masses from Yeovil on a sunny day will just turn up and buy their ticket, boarding the next train. Compulsory reservations on a service like that to Weymouth is  totally impractical to enforce

[TonyN]

A further development this morning. National rail enquiries has gone back to showing the yellow triangle for all cross country services indicating please book your space before you travel. This has been missing for the last week or so.

I have just contacted Cross Country to let them know that the 10 minute reservation tool on their website does not include Winchester. At the time it was introduced they did not call at Winchester. Although I suspect that using WIN in the text message you have to send would work anyway.

However all this must be totally off-putting for the infrequent user.

[MVR S&T]

Winchester is:

Winchester [WIN]
Service stop unadvertised

From realtime Trains.

What this means in practice only some people know, the railways are making it a right chore to travel even for the 'experts' amongst us. Let alone if you have a bike, given up taking my bike on the train, go by car now.

[bradshaw]

From a conversation I have been having on Twitter it would seem that the reservations are to limit online sales and not prevent you from turn up and go.

Edit to add
Apparently aimed at the Cl 80x services it has been added to all as a rather blunt tool.

[WSW Frome]

I have just booked on gwr.com a single ticket from WEY (16.10)-FRO^» (Frome - next trains) for next Sunday for my wife. This was to obtain one of the newly introduced advance fares which were available at £13.80 or £18.00 on some services. I supposedly got the last one available.
Naturally a reservation was required and the system did allow this to be booked, but then allocated "any seat on the train."

These advance fares are useful for single journeys but hardly a bargain for day or period (off-peak) returns.

[Sixty3Closure]

From a conversation I have been having on Twitter it would seem that the reservations are to limit online sales and not prevent you from turn up and go.

Edit to add
Apparently aimed at the Cl 80x services it has been added to all as a rather blunt tool.

They also seem to be using the same blunt tool for prices. Looking to travel to Carmarthen from Twyford around the 17th June the direct(ish) train is £154 for a single which is more than I've ever paid including when I go first class. Last journey 4 of us got off at Carmarthen which is 3 more than is normally on the train. There are cheaper fares travelling earlier and changing but more likely I won't travel.

[grahame]

I have asked for feedback from a GWR^▸ (Great Western Railway) contact on this, but no response received. However, I have noted a change in the journey planner and no longer have get all the way through the system before being rejected - it's now flagged up as the train times are being listed:

The journey planner cautioned me when I tried it out for some trains that "This train is sold out for all or part of the journey. If you are looking to buy a ticket we request that you try an alternative service. If you have already got a ticket for this train, please make sure you have your reservation when you travel." but as both the trains in the connection are in the middle of their journeys, I don't 100% trust that it applies to the section of the journey [name] will be making.

Better, but still a significant issue - on the service I was looking at, the train reported as "sold out" only runs every 2 hours, leaving a 4 hour gap in what I could book for a 45 minute journey.

[Sixty3Closure]

After all the challenges around reservations there were of course no reservations at all downloaded for my journey.

Again I'm not sure its going to encourage people to travel with confidence.

Its normally a 5+5 that splits but was only 5 this time. Do reservations still not work if the other carriages are missing? I assumed that had must have been fixed some time ago.

[grahame]

I have received a substantive reply from GWR^▸ (Great Western Railway) (thank you, GWR) - summarising here as best I can to explain the situation.

GWR and the other TOCs^▸ (Train Operating Company) are required not to oversell places on their trains at present; what (two years ago) a very uncomfortable journey if you had to squeeze your way on has become a potential spreader of a very serious virus.  At the same time, trains are there for key journeys and really need to be available for flexible, daily, last minute planned (unplanned in advance) travel.

They have chosen to meet their objectives as best "they can" by restricting online bookings on most of their trains to a level at which they leave enough space for turn-up-and-go passengers. There are, though, problems with this approach:

1. The online booking software wasn't written for this scenario and to some extent has been kludged to fit the need.  There has not been (would there have been time?) a rewrite and test to make the tool really fit for the job

2. If the online booking engine were to say "online bookings sold out but there will be places on the day", it would significantly reduce the intended discouragement - it relies on being economic with the truth to be effective. The side effect of having potential new leisure customers - the very people the railways will need - turned off has been noted, but is no more that a regretted side-note.

3. Online booking levels need, I suspect, to be very low indeed on popular services to allow space for last minute travellers (typically work and key journeys not leisure ones) and would potentially need to lowered further - perhaps to zero or beyond - if the last minute traveller is to remain accommodated.

4. The hardest traffic to predict is the turn-up-and-go which when added to a cautious approach means that there is likely to be the absurdity of lots of available (socially spaced too) capacity remaining unused even on normally-popular trains ...

I dislike the solution applied. However, that is a destructive and not a constructive criticism, and I can understand the difficult position GWR find themselves in - as do other TOCs - and I'm conscious that I'm not offering any better suggestion. 

It has taken a number of weeks for GWR to answer this query - an indication of its difficulty and the depth they have looked at answering, and I have noted in the meantime some changes in detail. Wasting people's time online by having them select a train, then whether they want forward or backward, window or aisle, only to then tell you "train full - try another" wasn't clever and brought the system (IMHO^▸ (in my humble opinion)) into more disrepute than was needed; the whole shenanigans brings disrepute anyway, but the absurdity of how it was done was gold plated disrepute.

I hope that we have less than a month of this to endure ... and on that basis, it should be a shorter term issue rather than a longer one.  I really hope so; best put time and effort into explaining as necessary, and to promoting use of trains with spaces and spreading leisure traffic away from leisure-peaks. Let's move on - anyone fancy a day out in Neath, Furze Platt, Aldermaston or Sea Mills?

[ray951]

The obvious question is why is there still social distancing on trains when no other mode of transport has it?

Buses - seems to be only seats that face one another that have any restrictions.
Tube - cant see any restrictions.
Taxi - no restrictions.
Planes - no restrictions and as far as I can tell have never had any restrictions.

Is this a case of we can do something so we will rather than there being a real need to have it?

I know that having to have reservations almost put the rest of my family off travelling by train; until I pointed out that they could just buy a ticket at the station and catch the first train that comes. How many others have been put off by the policy? When the railway needs all the money it can get this policy seems perverse and must be being driven by the government although I guess the fact that the tocs have no finanical risk may also be an issue.

[ChrisB]

In response to grahame points….

1. Who pays for the rewrite of ‘nationally-used’ software? Not the TOCs^▸ (Train Operating Company) as their ERMAs don’t require it, so the DfT^» (Department for Transport - about). Would they? I doubt it for the likely length of time since lockdown travel was lifted to likely full release. Also, it would take months of development & testing before it could be used. Enough time? Unlikely in my view.

2. Indeed, if that were allowed, the first seriously overcrowded train would feature heavily in the media & likely put off more leisure travellers than a few ‘fully-booked’ trains would, IMHO^▸ (in my humble opinion). Difficult to solve. People will return to trains I reckon quite quickly. Numbers are already on the rise.

I’ve made two long distance journeys recdntly (another this weekend) and numbers are rising quicker south of Birmingham than north thereof.

[grahame]

In response to grahame points….

1. Who pays for the rewrite of ‘nationally-used’ software? Not the TOCs^▸ (Train Operating Company) as their ERMAs don’t require it, so the DfT^» (Department for Transport - about). Would they? I doubt it for the likely length of time since lockdown travel was lifted to likely full release. Also, it would take months of development & testing before it could be used. Enough time? Unlikely in my view.

I agree with you, ChrisB - though I did not go on to ask "Ooze gonna pay" as it's impractical in the time, so the financial question is hypothetical

2. Indeed, if that were allowed, the first seriously overcrowded train would feature heavily in the media & likely put off more leisure travellers than a few ‘fully-booked’ trains would, IMHO^▸ (in my humble opinion). Difficult to solve. People will return to trains I reckon quite quickly. Numbers are already on the rise.

Agreed again, yes.  I have highlighted elements of your comments which are confirming what I wrote 

[jamestheredengine]

Let's move on - anyone fancy a day out in Neath

Might be a pint in it if anyone is venturing over here.