Great Western Coffee Shop

Can someone advise me on this one?    This evening (a Monday) I picked up a pretty unhappy customer from Melksham Station - arriving here on the train at 19:08 having travelled from Peterborough via London.

He bought his ticket on Trainline, selected the "Saver Fare" that it offered him for the journey, and travelled without problems from Peterborough in to London the across to Paddington.

At Paddington, he found all the trains on the departure board saying that Saver tickets are not valid - rather a worry - so he approached a member of the FGW staff who confirmed that he would have to buy an upgrade and sent him to queue at the ticket desks.   But when he got to the front of the queue, he was advised that he should be OK with the particular ticket he had.

Were both the departure board and the member of staff he approached wrong, or (he's a big guy) did the ticket desk bloke feel it was best just to let him travel, bearing in mind there wasn't a later service available to Melksham on which saver tickets are valid?

Oh - after all that, he only just caught his train and says he was in fear of what the ticket inspector on the train might think / do.

Gosh - I've just tried out Trainline.    For his trip down this evening and then back on Friday evening, I got a Saver return fare of 70.80 offered to me, but working the trip the other way from Melksham, and using THE SAME PEAK SERVICE from Peterborough back to Melksham, I got a standard fare of 144.00

.... And London Paddington to Melksham, and back, on the identical trains offered for the Peterborough trip comes in at 105.00 ...

In other works, if you want to go out from Paddington to Melksham one evening and back in the next evening, you can pay 105.00 for a conventional ticket, or you can ask for a ticket on which you could travel another hundred miles at least and it will cost you only 70.80.  Looks like madness!