Great Western Coffee Shop

An "Easement" is an exception to the routing guide for tickets - where following the general rules laid down for which routes can be followed has been officially judged to be a bit silly. 

For example,


allows passengers from Southampton Airport to places like Hamble to change trains at Southampton Central, even though the it would be a shorter journey if they changed at St Denys, where the lines from Southampton Airport and Hamble come together for the final couple of miles into Central.  The easement make sense, because lots of trains don't call at St Denys and making people change there could result in some very long waits, but the general rules don't allow passengers to go back and forth over the same line.

The list of easements is at http://www.atoc.org/clientfiles/files/easements.pdf if you want to take a look; although it refers to updates (which occur from time to time), there's no date on this file.  I would appreciate if someone with industry knowledge could let me know if it's the current version (and if not, where I can find the current version!)

Another sensible one:


Allows passengers from the Somerset end of the Berks and Hants to change at Westbury for Pewsey.  Through trains are allowed anyway, but as Westbury station is off the direct line, using a Weymouth line local into Westbury and changing there wouldn't be allowed without the easement.

Be aware that there are some negative easements ...


700042 here is disappointing - to my untutored  view, it would seem to be perfectly reasonable for people from Castle Cary to be allowed one stop to Taunton, then 1 stop on an express to get them into Bristol.   Far quicker than a through but infrequent and local train with 9 intermediate stops.

Some easements have me scratching my head - seemingly allowing things that are pretty darned obvious.  Are they there just to fix flaws in the way the general rules are set out, or have I missed something?


I can't imagine - 30046 - how you could get from south of Exeter St. David's to north of Exeter St David's without passing through Exeter St Davids!

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Suggestion - if you make a journey where you feel that the journey you're making is awkward due to railway geography or timetabling,  search the easements and see if someone's been there before and added an exception to the rules in for you.

I'll be surprised if that's the current list - atoc doesn't exist any more - you need to be looking at the Rail Delivery Group website which superceded ATOC.


Would be far more expensive too, and likely involve XC for some journeys. Maybe they couldn't agree a fare/fare split?


The easements are all programmed into the route planners, so putting your journey into one of those will give you all the permutations available.

ATOC still exists, at least as a server for the routeing guide in text format. (RDG handles the data feeds for it.) The current easements text file (dated 1/9/2017) is at http://iblocks-rg-publication.s3-website-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/easement_text.pdf.

PS: The routeing guide front page is at http://data.atoc.org/routeing-guide, which links to the various files. As you can see, these are really served from elsewhere, so data.toc.org is now just a link page (and atoc.org redirects to raildeliverygroup.com).

I am looking for NFM 28 (Avantix Traveller) from that page as well, but it's not there yet (well, yesterday when I checked).

My copy of Avantix Traveller has stopped working - it displays a message saying

    This app can't run on your PC
    To find a version for your PC, check with the software publisher.

I'm running Windows 10, but I've had the compatibility settings set toWindows 8 for this program - and it's been working happily up to now. Any idea what I'm doing wrong?

I'm running Windows 7, which isn't much help.

Oracle VirtualBox could help though. I use it to run a few VMs for backwards compatibility, if your PC is decent-ish you should be OK.

I presume this is an easement because of the Westbury avoiding line. But how is the non-geeky traveller supposed to know about the existence of such a thing? To most passengers, Westbury will simply be the next station after Frome before Pewsey.

More generally, I'm wondering about "via". To me it simply means "travelling through this place" but perhaps it has a specific railway usage for changing trains at a particular station?

A lot of these blindingly obvious examples are labelled as "Routeing Point" easements. In principle that means it corrects a quirk in the set-up of station groups and routeing points in the guide which gives funny results. However, I suspect that a lot of these have now been fixed, but no-one has bothered to take out the easement as it does no harm - well, actually it has no effect at all.

My understanding as that, unlike the other parts of the Routeing Guide, the easements exist as independent text and code (for ticketing engines to use). Presumably any such fossilised ones must survive in both forms, since otherwise it would to very easy to remove the text ones. But you'd need to be familiar with the data feeds to know that (which I'm not).

It appears sensible, but is only necessary for the programming of booking engines. The Routeing Guide already allows the route without consulting the Easements section. For example, Bruton to Pewsey via Westbury is a mapped route. No need to look for an easement.

Also, for east<->west routeing purposes, Westbury is a single routeing point covering both the station and avoiding line. 

What are Club 55 products?

700062
Customers travelling from Mortimer and Bramley via Newbury and in possession of Club 55 products, may travel via Reading West. This easement applies in both directions

From http://iblocks-rg-publication.s3-website-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/easement_text.pdf.

Club 55 are or have been promotional tickets for almost-oldies run at various times by some TOCs. Scotrail have done this more than once, but now have Club 50 (20% off, but you have to join). ATW were offering some return tickets for £26 earlier this year as "Club 55".

The easement is both historical (been there since 2012 if not before) and weird - covering the quirks, I'm sure.

I remember Canadian Club, but I thought it was Britvic 55?

FGW as was, took part on occasion too