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I'm confused 🙂
I'm booking a ticket to Penzance for an adventure. I don't want to go via London as I'm taking my bike so the tube and rush hour bike restrictions make it difficult.
So, I've worked out a route by manually splitting up the journey, changing at Gatwick. However, if I try and book it as one transaction/journey, Trainline only offers tickets via London which are £185, with splitsave enabled.
If book the two legs separately, changing at Gatwick and not going via London, its £16+£37. I only noticed the cheap prices by chance as I was messing around checking which London bound trains miss the rush hour bike ban. So why isn't splitsave offering this option?
In addition, I can't even see my first train at 04:59 if I put in the whole route, it seems to be invisible. The only way I've found to force it to show me the specific train I want, is to specify that I want to avoid either of the two London stations it normally offers, it then shows the 04:59 I want. And finally it will then give me the cheaper price of £53!
An £80 saving, no extra changes, and only 40 minutes extra total journey time over an 8 hour journey, and Trainline thinks its not of interest? I could understand it not showing illogical routes but this I can see plenty of people wanting to avoid changing via the London tube.
Any thoughts?!
PS Now the bike reservation challenge...
Ignore/delete post
I found similar issues with Rail Europe, where they only listed certain trains and certain times.
In order to get around the complexity of the train ticketing you have to devote an amount of time to be inventive about the routes to your final destination.
You have to devote the time, no rail company will tell you the combinations.
Well it seems it was a wasted evening. No bike spaces that day. In fact, no bike spaces any day it seems, on GWR, even several days before the event I'm doing and random days on other weeks. Do they just blank them out on Trainline? I'll ring GWR tomorrow to double check but they own website also says fully booked. I'm looking at mid May FFS 😭
I either need to get even more inventive to find a route, or look at one way car hire...
Not sure what GWR service you need to use but the one that runs Southampton to Bristol (and maybe beyond) was some tiny diesel thing with about 2x as many passengers as seats most of the time. Caveat I last used it pre COVID but I don't think that's changed. I can't imagine how you'd ever get a bike on one (although someone might have done it).
Red spotted hankie does the split tickets for you, pretty sure Trainline app added it too. Saves you doing the work.
Could you go SWT Waterloo to Exeter, then change to Penzance? Longer but more likely to get a bike reservation?
Dropped trainline as they add a booking fee to local train services now, so use the 'local' services app and save a fair amount.
I started to reply last night but had to cut it short so marked as to delete.
I'd like to think that I am rather good at these matters and also have some access to internal fare systems - what is your actual journey IE station from/station to, and your requirements?
If you could post this then I'll have a look and see what tickets may be best/cheapest for you.
Well it seems it was a wasted evening. No bike spaces that day. In fact, no bike spaces any day it seems, on GWR, even several days before the event I’m doing and random days on other weeks. Do they just blank them out on Trainline? I’ll ring GWR tomorrow to double check but they own website also says fully booked.
I've had this problem in the past. Book a train ticket with bike. Oh you can't book the bike on, you have to buy the ticket first, then add the bike.
OK, I have bought a ticket, can I book the bike on now?
Oh no, there are no spaces left on that train, you'll have to amend your booking for a new train and try again...
Bike bookings are highly variable anyway. EMR just read out a 6-digit code over the phone - no proof that you actually have anything, no ticket or QR code. I half thought about simply making up a 6-digit number last time I needed to travel EMR.
TransPennine, I use WhatsApp, send them a message and they reply within about 2 minutes with a code to show the conductor.
GWR does get more bookings than many operators cos a lot of people use them to get to Land's End for the start of LEJOG so they're probably more militant about it.
There's a Penzance branch of EuropCar who are well used to one-way rentals being dropped off at theirs...
Might be wrong here, but I seem to recollect that you can book bikes on some GWR services if you download the GWR app - otherwise if you can get to a station ticket office I think they might be able to book your bike on at the same time as purchasing the ticket. Phone to national rail might be able to do the same.