Limitations of UK split ticketing

Split ticketing?

Due to how frankly ridiculously expensive UK rail travel has become, I've been experimenting with split ticketing recently.

Last week there were some problems with my journey and the fact that I'd gone for a more complicated route resulted in some difficulties I had not anticipated, and which I'll have to bear in mind in future.

What I'd do in happier times

I'm not going to go back 10 years, when it was somehow affordable for two of us to go first class from Feltham to Birmingham New Street via London Euston. No, those days are long gone, but even a few years ago it was still relatively affordable to do standard class journeys on that route, the London Euston to Birmingham New Street part of which is now operated by Avanti West Coast.

So, typical route would be:

1. Feltham to Vauxhall
2. Victoria Line from Vauxhall to London Euston
3. London Euston to Birmingham New Street

Or, given that the trains that stop at Vauxhall are not so frequent, sometimes it would be:

1. Feltham to London Waterloo
2. Northern Line from London Waterloo to London Euston
3. London Euston to Birmingham New Street

Not too much difference in it. From departure of first train to arrival of last train you could expect this to take about 2h50m.

These days, either of those routes when booked conventionally a couple of weeks in advance will come to about £60–£80 per person.

You can sometimes make it a bit cheaper by picking a different operator that stops at many places between London Euston and Birmingham New Street thus taking much longer. There is also the Chiltern Railways route from London Marylebone to Birmingham Moor Street (or Birmingham Snow Hill) which is also sometimes a little cheaper while also being a lot slower.

Quite a lot of the time I have a further journey to do in Birmingham, and also my time there is short, so I usually value being at Birmingham New Street (for onward travel) and it not taking ages.

Splitting for savings

There are some absolutely crazy splits you can do for this journey to get it really cheap, like sub-£20, but they involve convoluted journeys with 6 or 7 changes and more than 5 hours of travelling.

The route I chose was:

1. Feltham to Clapham Junction
2. Clapham Junction to Harrow & Wealdstone
3. Harrow & Wealdstone to Watford Junction
4. Watford Junction to Birmingham New Street

The tricky part here is that the service from Clapham Junction stops at Harrow & Wealdstone before continuing to Watford Junction so despite being two individual tickets would be only one journey. The total cost of the full journey was £28.80 which did include seat reservations from Watford Junction to Birmingham New Street.

The train that I'd be getting on at Watford Junction would be the same (fairly) fast Avanti West Coast service that I would normally get on from London Euston, so not much time lost there, and this whole trip is still just one single train across London. Seemed okay, and I'd already done it a few times without issue.

How things went wrong on the day

On the day of travel there was a signal failure just outside Feltham and all trains from Feltham were cancelled for most of the day.

I checked how things were running fairly early, but not early enough to make it to Clapham Junction (by alternate means that I paid extra for) in time to make my connection to Watford Junction. No problem, right? Just get to London Euston and use the tickets on a later service.

Sadly not. Yes, due to the disruption I could use the tickets I had on a later service. But only a later service on the exact route I had tickets for. In this case, that was Clapham Junction to Harrow & Wealdstone, and there's only one train per hour for that. Despite me being at a major London terminal and wanting to get to another major London terminal, I could only use an annoying route.

What I ended up doing was paying extra to get to London Euston by the fastest route I could.

I then wanted to get on an Avanti West Coast service from London Euston to Birmingham New Street, the portion of which from Watford Junction I did already have tickets for. They would not allow me on the next one departing because that one did not stop at Watford Junction so they said my tickets weren't valid for it, even though it would arrive at destination later than the tickets I held. They told me I'd have to pay extra for a ticket to Watford Junction and then get the next Avanti West Coast from there, as my Birmingham ticket would be valid on that.

I did manage to do this and somehow arrived in Birmingham only 66 minutes late. Annoyingly I made it to Watford Junction 9 minutes after my original connection left, so I then had to wait there 51 minutes. If I had waited at Clapham Junction for the next Watford Junction train though, I would have missed the one I did get on and had to wait an hour for the next, making me over 2 hours late.

It's by no means the worst experience I've had on UK railways but it's just frustrating that it's so inflexible.

What I'll do differently in future

In the past I've always booked tickets from Feltham all the way through on the basis that if there's delays that cause me to miss a connection then I'm able to use the same tickets on later services, the big one being the leg from London Euston to Birmingham New Street. So, for example, if there were some big problem getting across London from Feltham then I would still be able to use the same tickets from London Euston.

That all falls apart when I've picked some route that doesn't involve London Euston. I might have to be careful not to do that again, which might mean that split ticketing is of little use to me, since most of the cheap results involve avoiding London Euston!

The other thing I might try is only booking journeys that start at London Euston, and just using Oyster pay as you go to get to it. Oyster is relatively cheap, and I'm normally quite good at looking early for disruptions and working around them. There's a few ways to get to London Euston if I have free choice of route.

Doing it on a coach (e.g. National Express) sounds unpleasant. I haven't tried that sort of thing since my student days 30 years ago. But, desperate times… I'll investigate.

Delay Repay

I'm still waiting for my Delay Repay claim to be processed but in theory it should result in a complete refund of the £28.80 since my delay was more than an hour but less than two hours.

This won't cover the extra I spent to still make my journey. I think it is possible to try to claim for these consequential losses but I'm not sure I have the will to try that.