Fares on South West Trains to London

[whole diary]

[JayMac]

The two hour thing is most probably how soon you can collect the tickets aft you've made the online purchase.

The industry standard is that Advance Purchase are available until 1800 the day before travel. Most third party retailers have this as their cut-off point. As others have said, some TOCs^▸ (Train Operating Company) will allow purchase up until 2359 the day before travel. CrossCountry have a 10 minute prior to departure facility, but only for journeys wholly on their trains.

Whatever the cut-off there has be APs available, of course!

Aside from CrossCountry and their 10 minute reservation scheme, seat reservations are typically available up to two hours before the train departs its origin station, although there may be different rules for certain services and local instructions may vary from this.

[grahame]

Whether the two-hour delay is real or not I don't know, as I've never tested the system; my guess would be that the ticket should be available more or less immediately but obviously that's not the kind of thing you want to try in case it goes wrong and you miss your train.

I have collected 20 minutes after booking.  Single experience, for tickets refused to me at the counter because I wasn't there at the right time of day to purchase them from the staffed facility, and the TVM^▸ (Ticket Vending Machine)'s front panel options didn't include what I needed . So I sat with my laptop in the concourse.   Story told elsewhere, but it's an example to help start answer this question.

[paul7575]

I remember someone explaining the TOD timings in uk.railway a while ago.  IIRC^▸ (if I recall/remember/read correctly) it is because in practice all transactions can be picked up at any TVM^▸ (Ticket Vending Machine) in the country, [1] and some TOC^▸ (Train Operating Company) or other still had an antiquated system that batch processed TOD every hour or so. 

So even if your local TOC and their machines are near instant, until the last TOC (whoever it happens to be) is also updated to deal with near instant transactions, they'll advertise a two hour limit just as a catch all.

[1] During the booking process you have to select a collection station from a drop-down list, but apparently the sole purpose of this is to prevent you deciding to pick up a station that hasn't got TOD enabled yet.  Whichever station you choose, the tickets are still made available at all TOD machines nationally.

Paul