Mirfield to York valid routes

[AlrightLad]

Hi all,

I commute between Mirfield and York, and have a season ticket for this journey. There's currently a 9-day blockade of my normal route via Dewsbury, so I've been looking at my options to avoid the replacement buses. One option I have is to take Grand Central to Wakefield Kirkgate, Northern from Kirkgate to Leeds, and then on to York from Leeds.

Am I understanding the routing guide correctly that my normal season ticket would be valid for this route? Or would I need to buy a separate ticket to cover Mirfield to Leeds via Wakefield?

 

[Watershed]

Hi all,

I commute between Mirfield and York, and have a season ticket for this journey. There's currently a 9-day blockade of my normal route via Dewsbury, so I've been looking at my options to avoid the replacement buses. One option I have is to take Grand Central to Wakefield Kirkgate, Northern from Kirkgate to Leeds, and then on to York from Leeds.

Am I understanding the routing guide correctly that my normal season ticket would be valid for this route? Or would I need to buy a separate ticket to cover Mirfield to Leeds via Wakefield?

Unfortunately, the range of permitted routes for this journey is normally extremely limited, requiring you to travel via Dewsbury. This is the only mapped route and also the only route within 3 miles of the shortest route.

There is a temporary map easement that has been published, 701059, which may be applicable to this journey:

This map easement is to accommodate routeing of Trans Pennie services via Wakefield Kirkgate during until 12 February 2023.

(the shocking spelling and grammar is verbatim!)

I suspect that this easement is the reason why journey planners are nevertheless able to offer itineraries via Wakefield Kirkgate and optionally Westgate.

Not all itineraries via Wakefield are offered - those involving Grand Central services are seemingly barred, which I suspect is down to GC not releasing reservations for such short journeys on their trains, which are falsely marked as reservations "compulsory" in the data. But you can still get itineraries involving the Northern Castleford service, which is sufficient to prove the validity of the route.

It's disappointing that travelling via Wakefield is only permitted for the duration of this temporary easement, as services are often diverted this way. There will be many more blockades to come as part of TRU; I'm not convinced that a temporary easement will be put in place for each blockade, let alone in good time - this time it only appeared after the blockade had already started.

 

[AlrightLad]

Thank you. I've clearly totally misunderstood what I was looking at before, but that makes sense.

The easement wording isn't very helpful, is it! I take it from what you're saying there's no (publicly available) way to see what the map easement actually is?

 

[kieron]

There is, but it's not straightforward. You'd start by creating an account at opendata.nationalrail.co.uk. There isn't a simple download page for it, but there's help on how to download it here and on how to read the data here.

That easement adds Huddersfield Group, Wakefield Kirkgate and Leeds to routes which involve routeing guide maps. Mirfield-York journeys use the YN map, so you go from Wakefield Kirkgate to Leeds via Normanton (with or without a reverse at Castleford) but not via Wakefield Westgate. If there are suitable trains, you could also stay on the GC train to Pontefract and catch a train from there to York.

Front line staff won't know the details, so you should be fine on any vaguely reasonable route.

 

[yorkie]

Mirfield to York is one of the worst value tickets in this area I can think of. There is no way I would ever buy such a ticket.

Next time I would swap your Season for something like Marsden to Sherburn in Elmet, which is the same price and give you more validity.

There are cheaper tickers which are valid for Mirfield to York but if you are making the journey every day it is probably best not to delve into loopholes.