About
How is this possible?
The railway’s national fares database is a very complicated affair, built up over many years and dealing with an extraordinary array of restrictions and conditions. This means that it is easily possible for two or more tickets to act identically to one through ticket, but be substantially cheaper.
The post on split ticketing in the RailUK Fares & Ticketing Guide is very informative. Note there that using multiple tickets is explicitly permitted by Section 19 of the National Rail Conditions of Carriage.
Most importantly, if you buy multiple tickets (and aren’t using zonal/ season tickets), be sure that the train you catch stops at the station or stations where you switch tickets. Otherwise your tickets will not be valid.
Other than that, you can catch exactly the same trains, changing and stopping at exactly the same places, as you would have done with a through ticket. You don’t have to get off the train when you switch tickets :)
How does this site work?
When you enter some journey details, it queries all the possible fares along the journey, works out which tickets are valid at those times due to off-peak restrictions and other factors, and then applies Dijkstra’s algorithm to find the cheapest way through. You may then have to guide it to your own best solution, by pointing out routes that you don’t want to take, or peak restrictions you might need.
What doesn’t this site do?
- Railcards – not just in terms of showing you prices, but e.g. if you have a Network railcard or other non-national railcard, you might well want to split at the boundary of the railcard to utilise its benefits.
- Advance tickets, which if you can stick to a precise train and are available, will probably be cheaper. But note you can try splitting Advance tickets too! Try looking up between major stations rather than your entire route; again, RailUK has more information on Advance quotas. Also consider special tickets such as MegaTrain.
- Journeys other than the ones given for the time specified. You may well need to tweak the time to get the journey you want (e.g. from Birmingham to Edinburgh whether you want to try splitting along the west or east coast lines).
- Definitely get everything right – it is more than likely that I have miscoded something in my parsing of the national fares and timetable databases, or misunderstood something in how ticket restrictions work. It has given me useful and correct results for my own journeys, but if you find a result that isn’t actually possible (it gives you a ticket which isn’t actually valid for that train when you check), or it’s missing a cheaper result than what it says, do let me know.
- One thing it doesn't understand is that time restrictions also apply to the final destination of a train you travel on, even if you get off before then – this appears to mostly apply to restrictions that are of the form “valid on trains arriving London Marylebone after 13:00” which means the site may give you e.g. a Super Off-peak Return for a time that it's not valid, sorry.
- As it only goes on stations stopped at, it may not by default give you e.g. a “via High Wycombe” ticket for a train that passes through (but doesn’t stop at) High Wycombe, though that ticket would be perfectly valid. The ticket will show up as normal if you view all tickets starting with the cheapest.
Useful links
- BRFares is a very handy site for looking up all the possible tickets between two stations.