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Could anyone help my daughter please ?  She has a return ticket from Aylesford to Warminster. (Super OP - any permitted route) her usual route is via Strood or Tonbridge to Waterloo East - and on from there.

On the return leg she would like to go to Clapham Jct and then into Victoria. Then take an Ashford train to Maidstone East, (short) walk to Maidstone Barracks and then get the Strood train to Aylesford (next stop). Is this a "Permitted Route" ? Neither of us can get a definitive answer from the Routing Guide !

The reason for this slightly convoluted route is that she wishes to break her journey between Victoria and Maidstone on her way home; rather than go home and have to buy more tickets (and back track) to achieve her aim.

Many thanks.

I don't think the Routeing Guide says anything about walking legs, so any route with one can't be permitted by the NRG. However, some walking links are shown in the data feeds, so journey planners do show them - but I have never found whatever it is that tells them they should.

The £71.40 ticket, right?   (Before any railcard discounts).    Same price to Aylesford and to Maidstone STATIONS so she can probably ask at Warminster to excess the ticket to Maidstone stations - that would allow London to East, West or Barracks.  Then just a single back to Aylesford.

Note my use of "probably" - this is an educated guess and should be checked with - well, goodness knows who. Quick trip to Warminster station prior to travel at a none-rush time but when the booking office is open, and showing her natural charm ... and I'm sure it can be fixed.

I put "via Otford" into a mixing deck journey planner and it showed the desired journey (in and out of Victoria via Clapham Junction, then the Maidstone walk), but with no tickets available. Not definitive, but a useful start. Maybe grahame's option looks good - replacing Aylesford for Maidstone Stations presented the £71.40 ticket as valid with the same itinerary (minus the walk if that makes sense). Can overdistance excesses (£0.00) in this case be issued to extend the "Origin station end"?

By the way, while poking around I found Maidstone Stations to Salisbury via Barnham Off-Peak return priced at £32.70; I recall Bignosemac extolling the virtues of these Southern priced flows a while back.

I've just tried NR's OJP for that trip, telling it to avoid Paddock Wood. One of the options it comes up with is exactly what you were asking about - and that's as close to being "permitted" as you are likely to get (unless you ask someone and trust them to be definitively right - righter than the OJP).

But (there's always one) that was for a single, not a return, and it's not offering me SOP returns at all. There's no obvious reason, but then the two edit buttons aren't working at the moment either, so maybe it's not well.

Waterloo East to Waterloo ?     
I just put Aylesford to Barming into Mixing Deck - and that tells me to walk between Maidstone Barracks and Maidstone East.

Just had a text from daughter - the guard on the train from Waterloo "thinks" that it may be a valid route.  He did tell her it was valid to go Westbury/Paddington/HS1................but that wasn't the question..

I think that if the OJP doesn't provide a return fare, it is because it thinks the route is not valid as a through journey; it will offer the route as a combination of singles, but make it very hard to see which combination of singles it is offering.

For this interesting journey, OJP is not offering many valid journeys via any route; everything is via St Pancras but most suggestions are via Salisbury which apparently is not valid.

I would suspect that in cases like this where it's patently reasonable, but very difficult to work out whether it is permitted or not, the chances of anyone challenging it on the ground are vanishingly small (even more so, seeing as South Eastern types are unlikely to know where Warminster is).

I think that's mixing up two distinct things. The OJP can cope with two singles as an alternative to a return; it has to for advance fares. That''s why it offers routes for both halves separately, but you choice of the outward fare alters what it offers on the return. In some ways doing research - looking at the offers without making a selection - makes it look confusing. For checking permitted routes and nothing else it's simpler to request a single, but obviously that tells you nothing about timing restrictions. 

When it finds a journey (a sequence of trains) with a route it thinks is not permitted, it puts up that annoying "Multiple Tickets Required for Journey" flag. It doesn't tell you which options that applies to - sometimes there's no price, sometimes there's a price that looks like only part-route, and maybe sometimes it adds the part-route prices. The OJP is a weird and (sometimes) wonderful thing but I wouldn't accuse it of being consistently consistent.

But it's true this example is a complicated one. There are two valid routeing points at each end (so says the NRG's checker), and a total of twenty map combinations plus London routeing.

But to recap - before opening the NRG, any direct service is permitted (there are none), and any route with a lower specific fare (again, none as only Any Permitted fares exist). (You may recall that when discussing walking legs around Farnborough there were fares such as "via Farnborough North".) And the shortest route by track distance is also always permitted, but I wish you fun trying to find it! I guess it's a scenic route across southern England, with many changes, so a lot of work would be needed. That calculation cannot, AFAIK, include walking legs, or else I suspect that Tonbridge/Redhill/Guildford/Farnboroughs/Salisbury might be the one.

The routeing point for Warminster is Salisbury or Westbury, and in both cases the mapped routes are from London, one option from Waterloo and two from Paddington.  Plus there's an oddity running from south wales to Waterloo through Warminster, but listed under Westbury. At the other end the routeing point is Strood or Tonbridge, and again all the options are to London - but there are more possibilities (2 and 4). None of them includes St Pancras, but that is covered under the London routeing. Finally, there can be a third map in the middle, always the one from Waterloo to Reading or Woking.

But with all these possibilities, during off-peak hours most journeys offered use HS1 - quick and simple. Once timing restrictions kick in, more interesting journeys do come up - seven changes, for example. That's a result of the OJP trying very hard to find an off-peak option at 08:00, and succeeding. But it is odd that so many journeys offered don't match any of the permitted routes.

To return to the original question, forcing that walk at Maidstone gives only multi-ticket quotes, meaning the OJP thinks it's not permitted. But then it's not using either valid routeing point, so it wouldn't be, and I think that rule the OJP does follow.

Both Warminster and Westbury ticket offices say that route is OK.  We'll see what happens on the train tomorrow........................

Well................... for a start the 0949 WMN to SAL was cancelled .........but the dirty, evil, carbon producing Fiesta came to the rescue when I had to drive her to Salisbury to make her connection. (Yet another delay/repay going in - that's the 4th one in 4 weeks!!)
When she got to Victoria the barrier wouldn't accept her ticket, but the human being did..........no one came round on the train, so her original question still hasn't been definitively answered.
Many thanks for all the comments.

A definitive answer for (what some might see as) an esoteric routeing? I suspect you'll be waiting a long time.

And that's even if you ask the mysterious beings (I'm not sure they're human) responsible for the National Routeing Guide.

I fear you may be correct with both your statements above  - but is it really an "esoteric routing" if it gets my daughter home 30  mins quicker that the "unesoteric" (?) route ?   ;)

Delighted that the journey worked.   The chance of it being challenged was, I suspect pretty close to zero (if your daughter was observed making the same journey on a very frequent basis, someone *might* actually try and check) and on balance of probability (and with all sanity) should be valid.

Sadly, closure is rare on cases such as this with unusual or unique features.  No answer provided for sure for next time the same journey is made, and almost a feeling of disappointment that no-one has taken a look during the journey and said either (a) that's fine or (b) you shouldn't be doing this (because ...)

My daughter says she will probably use that route on her way back to Kent from now on. The No 1 "permitted route" includes, Waterloo East to Strood - there are no longer any through trains on this leg - there are now 1, 2 or 3 changes. The 3 change version has as its first leg, Waterloo East to .............Victoria, by tube !!

It is no use to her going the other way as she would be trying to board an already packed Warminster train at Clapham. She will come via Tonbridge still.

Another interesting point she raised last night - if the man at Victoria barrier let her onto the train with her existing ticket, where would she then stand if the on-train man said her ticket wasn't valid ?  (No "definitive answer" required  ;D ;D)

The double back between Clapham and Victoria might be an issue:

http://data.atoc.org/routeing-guide
From Easements (Section E):
700013 Tickets with the following route codes may be used to double back between Clapham Junction and London Victoria. (London, London Not Underground, Not Valid on HS1, AP London Woking)

Personally I'd save the £16 odd quid going via Barnham on the Southern priced flow with singles as needed bridging the ends. Journey time might be slightly longer.

Edit: Having said the above, the Maidstone Stns +Any Permitted ticket does allow the double back in the journey planner so it may not be anything of concern. I cannot see anything that specifically allows it though, but journey planners and the routing guide are not necessarily in sync.

There isn't a double-back there: Victoria trains on the Chatham Line don't pass through Clapham Junction.

That's actually a really weirdly worded easement, as if you're doing something on the Brighton side (say, Epsom to Gatwick Airport), then Any Permitted is valid via Victoria, Not London via Clapham Junction and Not Clapham Junction either via Dorking or by doing weird things in Croydon/Selhurst/Norwood. It's on the Chatham side that one gets the "London", "London Not Underground", and most obviously "Not Valid on HS1" routes, but they don't serve Clapham Junction anyway.

What I was trying to say was that if you try testing the route validity with a single journey, the OJP will automatically suggest multiple tickets if the whole journey isn't a permitted route, but that the OJP display doesn't make it obvious in which cases it has done this (yest it comes up with the irritating multiple tickets / grey fog, but this may apply to some but not all of the journeys suggested). Under the fare on the right-hand side it lists only one of the multiple ticket types. ( I have just noticed that clicking on the "other tickets" link, in addition to displaying other types of ticket available for the journey, also displays the multiple tickets information (albeit with the price but not the origin and destination of each ticket!)

When you try to select a return journey for a non-permitted route, OJP says "no return fares available" and offers only single tickets (a pair for each way, usually, although I broke the OJP when testing this). One should be able to buy a pair of return tickets for the journey (the same intermediate station as OJP supplies for the singles) but this seems to be beyond OJP.

If OJP decides on a range of permitted and non-permitted routes for a return journey, fares are only displayed for the permitted routes (although sometimes these will not be displayed if there's not a return journey option via the same route during the time period selected).

After all that I think what we need is a permitted-route-finder app!

Well..................it wasn't cancelled according to GWR - as they state in their rejection of her delay claim !!!  It wasn't cancelled because there was never a train scheduled to run at that time - according to them !!
Screen shots of RTT and CIS now winging towards GWR, showing that this non-existent train (2Z30) was scheduled and was cancelled !

Do they reject ALL claims as a matter of course ? has some bean-counter calculated that x% will "give up and go away" after the first rejection ??