Necessity of the routing guide

[Fermiboson]

The routing guide is quite a complicated document, and something of a pain to look up. It also seems to be subject to constant manual adjustment and errors, as we’ve seen from cases where routes that should/should not be valid were raised on the forum and corrected shortly afterwards. Even journey planners, delay repay calculations, etc. constantly get confused by the complexity.

Is there a reason why this cannot be simplified into a uniform rule by building in the existing easements? For example:
- For a given ticket and restriction code, calculate the shortest rail journey by track miles available with the relevant time/TOC restrictions (i.e. the shortest route easement already defined in the guide).
- Any journey complying with the relevant time/TOC restrictions, which has a track mileage not more than, say, 15% higher than that of the shortest route, is valid (with some exceptions made possibly for more peculiar flows, or a lower limit for commuter flows).
- Any direct service between the origin and destination is valid, subject again to time/TOC restrictions, regardless of the track mileage.

A mathematical rule of this sort would eliminate a lot of the ambiguity and confusion around the guide, or at least it seems that way to me.

 

[Bletchleyite]

I'm not sure that wouldn't rule out a load of perfectly reasonable routes.

One way to simplify it and remove a lot of inconsistencies would be to make it recursive, so you'd only need to say (for instance) Euston-Glasgow is valid via Birmingham or Tamworth, and therefore it's valid as far as Birmingham via High Wycombe or Rugby etc.

On the other hand for Advances it doesn't really serve much of a purpose if these were priced by vehicle journey and summed up onto the one ticket - just go whatever way you like and add the prices up. If you want to go from London to Milton Keynes via Wick, go for it, you'd just price up each train used. If we do end up everything going LNER style, then for the tiny number of people buying punitively priced Anytimes you may as well let them go any way they like within reason.

 

[RJ]

It is what it is. Most people don't need to worry about it as the websites offer basic journey plans based on its contents. And as with many systems, those who make the effort to learn about the Routeing Guide can use it to their advantage.

From my perspective as a passenger, it's a money saving tool so no complaints with it really.

 

[ASharpe]

I suspect the shortest route will rarely be the fastest or have enough capacity for many long distance services, the Ribblehead Viaduct would need an upgrade for a start.

Reaching some interchange points would be a nightmare and instead you would have to take a shorter but slower route with poor connections.

I find the Routing Guide very useful and TOCs generally do make changes when timetable recasts etc make a different route potentially popular.

I like to take advantage of it the most when I can take a convoluted route home to visit parts of the county I would otherwise miss out on sticking to the mainline. And I get to tick off Wetherspoons.

If you are a bit intimidated about it or just want to learn more then watch out for the next fares workshop in the flrum meets section. They make for a good day out.

 

[Fermiboson]

Point taken about the usefulness/way to save money, of course.

I suspect the shortest route will rarely be the fastest or have enough capacity for many long distance services, the Ribblehead Viaduct would need an upgrade for a start.

Is there really a high speed route which is more than 15% longer than the shortest route? Barring maybe London - Scotland and some localised special cases (perhaps Leamington Spa - BHM via Coventry?) I can't think of any examples.

 

[xotGD]

I just want a website where I can enter two stations and it will display a map of all valid routes.

It ain't rocket science.

 

[Wallsendmag]

I just want a website where I can enter two stations and it will display a map of all valid routes.

It ain't rocket science.

There was one once upon a time

 

[yorkie]

The routing guide is quite a complicated document, and something of a pain to look up....

Unless you work in a journey planning role, there is no real need to look it up as such. It exists for the purpose of journey planners validating fares for itineraries.

It also seems to be subject to constant manual adjustment and errors, as we’ve seen from cases where routes that should/should not be valid were raised on the forum and corrected shortly afterwards. Even journey planners, delay repay calculations, etc. constantly get confused by the complexity.

I suspect that any system that needs rules-based logic to determine what is permitted will need adjustments from time to time.

Is there a reason why this cannot be simplified into a uniform rule by building in the existing easements? For example:
- For a given ticket and restriction code, calculate the shortest rail journey by track miles available with the relevant time/TOC restrictions (i.e. the shortest route easement already defined in the guide).

OK so for Poppleton to Sheffield, we're going via Pontefract, right?

- Any journey complying with the relevant time/TOC restrictions, which has a track mileage not more than, say, 15% higher than that of the shortest route, is valid (with some exceptions made possibly for more peculiar flows, or a lower limit for commuter flows).

Going via Leeds is rather more than 15% extra!

- Any direct service between the origin and destination is valid, subject again to time/TOC restrictions, regardless of the track mileage.

As there are no direct trains, that means that Poppleton to Sheffield becomes a very difficult journey to make. No thanks.

A mathematical rule of this sort would eliminate a lot of the ambiguity and confusion around the guide, or at least it seems that way to me.

It would eliminate many permitted routes.

Perhaps RDG would implement this, if they could possibly get away with it

I just want a website where I can enter two stations and it will display a map of all valid routes.

I'm sure pricing managers would like that too

; you'd soon find your favourite tickets become rather more restrictive, though...

It ain't rocket science.

It's not a technical impossibility by any means, but there are all sorts of other considerations before such a tool would simply be made freely available for everyone and anyone to use.

There was one once upon a time

There still is! But not one that is publicly available, as far as I know.

I like to take advantage of it the most when I can take a convoluted route home to visit parts of the county I would otherwise miss out on sticking to the mainline. And I get to tick off Wetherspoons.

I agree; sadly however we do seem to be in a bit of a battle to retain good value fares that offer such flexibility; the 'powers that be' would much rather such journeys were done by car

...If you are a bit intimidated about it or just want to learn more then watch out for the next fares workshop....

I'll run one or two this year at some point; if more people used the forum's ticketing website (to actually purchase tickets, instead of just using it to buy elsewhere to gain cashback and stuff) we'd have the funding to run more

I'm not sure that wouldn't rule out a load of perfectly reasonable routes.

I know it would; the first example I thought of is immediately ruled out!

 

[Fermiboson]

OK so for Poppleton to Sheffield, we're going via Pontefract, right?

I'm sure you know quite a bit more about this than I do on the other points, but just for this example in particular:
Poppleton to Sheffield via Pontefract Baghill 48mi 72ch
Poppleton to Sheffield via York and ECML 35mi 10ch (to Doncaster) + 18mi 19ch = 53mi 29ch (+9.13%)
Poppleton to Sheffield via York and Leeds 28mi 16ch (to Leeds) + 37mi 49ch = 65mi 65ch (+34.6%)
so perhaps 15% is a bit too strict, but it doesn't eliminate all reasonable options. Moreover, there should be an argument that as Poppleton is within the York routing point, the "direct service" rule kicks in and the XC via Leeds is a valid service to take. But then if we reintroduce routing points that readds a lot of the complexity and obscurity this purports to get rid of, so I see what you mean. Perhaps a bigger problem occurs when there is an off-peak parliamentary (or otherwise sparse) service every day that connects two branches, e.g. Retford - Cleethorpes.

 

[yorkie]

I'm sure you know quite a bit more about this than I do on the other points, but just for this example in particular:
Poppleton to Sheffield via Pontefract Baghill 48mi 72ch
Poppleton to Sheffield via York and ECML 35mi 10ch (to Doncaster) + 18mi 19ch = 53mi 29ch (+9.13%)
Poppleton to Sheffield via York and Leeds 28mi 16ch (to Leeds) + 37mi 49ch = 65mi 65ch (+34.6%)
so perhaps 15% is a bit too strict, but it doesn't eliminate all reasonable options.

True, but these days there aren't many York to Sheffield services via Doncaster; a lot of them disappeared during 2020 and we've not got them all back yet!

In any case, not everyone wants to just visit one other place! Car drivers can go to multiple destinations without anyone telling them what they can or can't do. The idea that rail passengers from Poppleton to Sheffield shouldn't be allowed to go via Leeds sounds like yet another attempt to put people off using railways.

Moreover, there should be an argument that as Poppleton is within the York routing point, the "direct service" rule kicks in and the XC via Leeds is a valid service to take. But then if we reintroduce routing points that readds a lot of the complexity and obscurity this purports to get rid of, so I see what you mean.

Exactly!

Perhaps a bigger problem occurs when there is an off-peak parliamentary (or otherwise sparse) service every day that connects two branches, e.g. Retford - Cleethorpes.

By definition, a "parliamentary" service runs only once a week (the minimum frequency before a service has to go through closure proceedings) and most people here agree with this, but notwithstanding that, yes indeed frequencies can cause issues when attempting to stipulate what routes people should take.

 

[miklcct]

The routing guide is quite a complicated document, and something of a pain to look up. It also seems to be subject to constant manual adjustment and errors, as we’ve seen from cases where routes that should/should not be valid were raised on the forum and corrected shortly afterwards. Even journey planners, delay repay calculations, etc. constantly get confused by the complexity.

Is there a reason why this cannot be simplified into a uniform rule by building in the existing easements? For example:
- For a given ticket and restriction code, calculate the shortest rail journey by track miles available with the relevant time/TOC restrictions (i.e. the shortest route easement already defined in the guide).
- Any journey complying with the relevant time/TOC restrictions, which has a track mileage not more than, say, 15% higher than that of the shortest route, is valid (with some exceptions made possibly for more peculiar flows, or a lower limit for commuter flows).
- Any direct service between the origin and destination is valid, subject again to time/TOC restrictions, regardless of the track mileage.

A mathematical rule of this sort would eliminate a lot of the ambiguity and confusion around the guide, or at least it seems that way to me.

The current rules allow for:
- shortest
- direct
- routes in the Routeing Guide

My idea is to replace the Routeing Guide with a recursion, which means for all journeys where you want to allow a non-shortest route, you just define permissible pass points in addition to direct and shortest (where double-backing is defined to be allowed / not allowed for each pass point), and the allowed routes are resolved recursively until the local level.

For example, West Hampstead to Brighton can be defined to be:
- via London St Pancras
- via Kensington Olympia

and recursively, West Hampstead to each of the above is only direct / shortest, while London St Pancras to Brighton is defined via East Croydon; Kensington Olympia to Brighton is defined via Clapham Junction; London St Pancras to East Croydon is defined via London Blackfriars or London Victoria or London Bridge, etc.

The no-doubleback rule is to prevent an A-B-C-A loop defining A-B travel permissible via C, and A-C travel permissible via B, creating infinite recursion if double-back is allowed. Some examples with doublebacks include, for example, Kentish Town to Sheffield should have a permissible via point of London (doubleback).

 

[Pigeon]

I just want a website where I can enter two stations and it will display a map of all valid routes.

It ain't rocket science.

I tried to do a backend for this once. The problem itself isn't conceptually too hard (although there's an awfully boring lot of it); the principal difficulty was getting all the data to put into it in a form that made that actually possible. It's there, but it's all in flipping PDFs - lots of huge ones. And while converting a PDF to a "readable" text form from which you can extract raw data is trivial (contrary to popular belief), extracting meaningful data, on that scale, reliably, without error, and without human intervention to tweak and re-hack the extractor individually for every PDF you give it, is a ruddy terrible task, because the PDF format loses all the vital semantic information that you use when doing this kind of extraction from other "presentation" formats, like scraping HTML pages for instance. So in the end I didn't do it.

 

[yorkie]

I tried to do a backend for this once. The problem itself isn't conceptually too hard (although there's an awfully boring lot of it); the principal difficulty was getting all the data to put into it in a form that made that actually possible. It's there, but it's all in flipping PDFs - lots of huge ones. And while converting a PDF to a "readable" text form from which you can extract raw data is trivial (contrary to popular belief), extracting meaningful data, on that scale, reliably, without error, and without human intervention to tweak and re-hack the extractor individually for every PDF you give it, is a ruddy terrible task, because the PDF format loses all the vital semantic information that you use when doing this kind of extraction from other "presentation" formats, like scraping HTML pages for instance. So in the end I didn't do it.

To have any hope of doing this, you need to use the data feed, not scrape the PDFs.

(As mentioned above, someone has already done this, but it's not publicly available)

 

[Pigeon]

To have any hope of doing this, you need to use the data feed, not scrape the PDFs.

(As mentioned above, someone has already done this, but it's not publicly available)

Well, yeah, that's my point. As are most of us, I am "ordinary public", restricted to doing it with whatever is generally and freely available, so I don't have a choice: it's scrape the PDFs or nothing.

It would work, if only PDF wasn't such a horribly unscrapable format.

 

[yorkie]

Well, yeah, that's my point. As are most of us, I am "ordinary public", restricted to doing it with whatever is generally and freely available, so I don't have a choice: it's scrape the PDFs or nothing.

It would work, if only PDF wasn't such a horribly unscrapable format.

The fares data is open to the "ordinary public"; you just need to register:

National Rail Data Portal

opendata.nationalrail.co.uk

 

[Watershed]

The fares data is open to the "ordinary public"; you just need to register:

National Rail Data Portal

opendata.nationalrail.co.uk

It's available but I would hardly regard it as accessible to ordinary members of the public as it's in a complex format that can, realistically speaking, only be interpreted by custom-built software.

 

[yorkie]

I was merely responding in the context of what had been written in post #12 of this thread, i.e. that someone is planning to write some software and is planning to scrape the PDFs to obtain the data, rather than obtaining the data directly.

Whether or not someone planning to do that is an "ordinary person" or not, I will stay out of!

 

[Gaelan]

I'm sure pricing managers would like that too

; you'd soon find your favourite tickets become rather more restrictive, though...

I'm shocked that this doesn't exist internally.

 

[Pigeon]

It's available but I would hardly regard it as accessible to ordinary members of the public as it's in a complex format that can, realistically speaking, only be interpreted by custom-built software.

I was intending to write the necessary software, so that aspect isn't a problem.

However, "freely available" and "needs registration" are mutually exclusive as far as I'm concerned. And it's entirely unreasonable to "require registration" in any case when the PDF version does not.

On top of that, I see that since I last looked at it, that page has been rewritten by some species of benighted moron such that it completely fails to display anything at all. The reason is immediately obvious on looking at the page source: there is nothing there for it to display in the first place.

This means that even if I didn't fundamentally object to "requires registration", I still can't actually do it without jumping through some even more unreasonable hoops. First I would have to pull apart a huge pile of completely unnecessary javascript that shouldn't be there at all, of the usual bloated, grotesquely overcomplicated, badly-written and obfuscated kind, and which, quite unsurprisingly, does not work; figure out what it's all doing; separate the functionality that's actually necessary from that which is just intrusive evil crap; and then re-implement that necessary functionality in a form which does work.

It's not that I can't do that; it's simply that I'm sick of having to spend hours writing code to fix sites that used to work once upon a time but don't any more because some complete and utter idiot has broken them with this sort of rubbish. Writing code to parse the format the data is supplied in is an obviously and inevitably necessary step. Mucking around endlessly to get around unnecessary obstacles deliberately introduced by obstructionist fools, on the other hand, just makes me so thoroughly angry that this project has now moved well into the region where I simply won't do it because I don't want to cope with feeling that angry for so long a time. Any possibility of enjoying the project - which is the primary motivation in the first place - has vanished beyond hope of recovery.

 

[Egg Centric]

This is missing the wood for the trees.

There is little conceivable reason to reform the routing guide as an end in itself.

The underlying purpose is basically fares reform.

This could certainly be done algorithmically.

But before designing such an algorithm we would need to agree what we're trying to do with the fare structure. And there is no such agreement. Even incredibly simple stuff like whether we're trying to encourage or discourage train travel isn't universally agreed.

Figure out and agree those objectives first and then the algorithm can follow.

 

[furlong]

The fares data is open to the "ordinary public"; you just need to register:

It is most definately not open to the "ordinary public". Registration might have worked for you if you got lucky once, but I've tried to register multiple times over the years and never been successful. As pigeon says, the process basically doesn't work and attempts to make contact with them never elicit a response. That page is just for show, designed to make people give up trying - unless you're going to be paying them, they've no interest in providing you with a way to access the data that actually works.