Once I knew a secret

Earlier today I thought that I was privy to a secret.

This is no trivial secret. This is not a hole in the roof that you don’t tell the person who buys your house about sort of secret. This is not the plan to close the factory where you have been working since you were sixteen years old that somebody accidentally left in the photo-copier. This is colonel Sanders’s recipe, or the cross on a tatty, stained seventeenth century map that marks the exact location of Captain Kidd’s treasure, or the rotating book-case in every second episode of Midsomer Murders sort.

I found out a way to go by train from Kingsknowe to Thatcham with only one ticket and without going through London.

To tell the truth, I did not discover this valuable nugget unaided. I did try. I spent hours trying to wrest a ticket from Kingsknowe to Thatcham out of the National Rail website, but it defeated me. I sent an e-mail to National Rail asking how to buy the ticket I needed and within a day or two I had a reply.

Let me explain. Kingsknowe is the nearest railway station to my house. Thatcham is the nearest station to where my daughter Tania used to live.

The quickest route from Kingsknowe to Thatcham is to take the train from Edinburgh to London, cross London on the Underground and take another train from Paddington to Thatcham.

However, the most convenient route from Kingsknowe to Thatcham is not the quickest. It takes longer to catch the train from Edinburgh to Newcastle, then take another train from Newcastle to Reading, and finally take a fourth train on to Thatcham. But it avoids the staggering inconvenience of travelling from Kings Cross to Paddington on the London Underground, with its endless winding corridors, escalators, lifts, beggars, pick-pockets and trains in which passengers are packed closer together than the proverbial sardines in a tin.

Maps might make the issue a bit clearer:

This is the fastest route but I don’t want to go this way	This is the easiest route because it avoids London. The train from Newcastle goes to Reading. You don't need to change trains in Birmingham.

This is how you normally buy a ticket on line, although you cannot escape using it by going to your nearest station and asking the booking clerk there to sell it to you, because he has to use the exact same computer program that you do. The form for buying a ticket is here: nationalrail.co.uk You start by filling in the names of your begin and end stations and the dates when you want to travel.
 

Then you click on ‘Show times and prices.’ (Note in passing that the site doesn’t use the word ‘fare’ like you and I do, which — like their confusing their ‘passengers’ with their ‘customers’ — contributes to the impression you sometimes get that the people who put themselves in charge of the privatised shambles which our railways have become know nothing whatever about trains.)
 

The computer magically shows you a list of trains that you can travel on, and it asks you to pick one. In this case, the first journey it finds begins with the 09:37 from Kingsknowe, with three changes of train. Those are in Edinburgh, London Kings Cross and London Paddington, an excruciating journey if you have luggage, or a wheel-chair.
 

Look again at the first train that it suggests, the 09:37 from Kingsknowe. That gets you to Edinburgh, and there you are supposed to take the 10:31 to Kings Cross. It does not tell you that if you get off the London bound train in Newcastle at 11:55, a train will set off for Reading at 12:33, sparing you the rigours of travelling through London.

Once upon a time, if you knew the secret, you could take that easier and sensibler route. Here is the secret. As I found out when I tried to buy a return through ticket from Kingsknowe to Thatcham at Haymarket station in Edinburgh, even the station staff didn’t know it.
 

On the first screen, above the station names, there is a link, ‘Route Options.’ You click that. A hidden row appears, the book-case rotates. In the hidden row you choose ‘Change At’ and you type ‘Newcastle.’
 

That used to work. The computer asked you whether you wanted to change at Newcastle and take the direct train to Reading. But now, it doesn’t.
 

Take a look at that 09:37 departure from Kingsknowe. The computer actually suggests that, since you want to change at Newcastle, you get off the London train at Newcastle, wait for the next train to London and get onto that. You have to make exactly the same journey on the Underground from Kings Cross to Paddington, only an hour later. The possibility of an easier ride avoiding London no longer gets a mention. Though, to be fair, the computer does notice that you can avoid London if you take the 12:33 from Kingsknowe.

If you don’t tell it that you want to change at Newcastle, it doesn’t tell you that you can. Therefore, you cannot buy a through ticket for that journey, and that in turn means you pay more for two tickets than you would have paid for one, and you lose the right to travel on a later train if your connection runs late and you miss it. There is, as things appear to stand, no way to buy a ticket that doesn’t depend on software that doesn’t work.