Dividing a rail journey into separate segments can save a fortune on train tickets. As ticket-splitting becomes mainstream, will anyone ever pay full price ever again for rail travel?
What is split ticketing?
The practice of exploiting anomalies in Britain’s extremely complex rail fare structure to reduce the cost of train travel. On many journeys, buying two or more segments is cheaper than a through ticket.
From Shrewsbury to Liverpool, you must change trains in Chester. The obvious thing to do, you would imagine, is to buy a through Anytime fare is £31. But if you buy separate tickets for each leg– Shrewsbury-Chester and Chester-Liverpool – you save over £10, reducing the cost by one-third.
That is a simple example of ticket splitting at the connecting station. Yet the technique also works where the passenger stays on the same train.
For example, the Great Western line from London Paddington to Bristol Temple Meads has a walk-up Anytime fare for rush-hour trains of £118.40 (for a journey of just 100 minutes). But you can save over £43 by splitting tickets for the journey at Didcot Parkway.
In-the-know travellers have long known about this particular “Didcot dodge”, and about services such as TrainSplit.com. But increasingly passenger-friendly technology means that neither local knowledge nor complicated transactions are necessary.
Trainline automatically offers “SplitSave” tickets that exploit ticket-splitting opportunities – searching for the lowest combination of Advance, Off-peak and Anytime fares that will work for your journey. “Stay on the train, just switch tickets” is the mantra.
Is ticket-splitting legal?
Yes. The only requirement is that the train stops to set down and pick up passengers at the intermediate station.
On that London-Bristol route, the vast majority of Great Western Railway services stop in Didcot.
But between the English and Welsh capitals, most trains swoosh through the lovely Parkway station at 125mph. So if you have booked London-Didcot and Didcot-Cardiff you will be travelling without a valid ticket.
GWR says: “You could be issued with an…
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