Originally Posted by
mtkeller
Aha! I now see the timetables for early April, and presumably the horrific description for later in the month will have timetables added later. (The ones I'm seeing for earlier in the month don't have trains via Oxford, so presumably the engineering work is a bit of a different stripe those weekends.)
We have advance tickets. Would I have to check with Chiltern about what routing we're allowed to use? (I say allowed rather than supposed, because it would be nice to use the best routing even if that's not what Chiltern would prefer.) I am also not opposed to playing the dumb American card once on the train if there's something that it will allow us to get away with that's easier.
The temporary timetables should appear soon (well, they really should have appeared already but we'll leave that to one side!).
If you have Advance tickets then you're supposed to use route that Chiltern says - and you definitely wouldn't get anywhere trying to use your tickets on a Virgin train from Euston to Birmingham! The only question mark would be whether you were permitted to use Crosscountry trains from Reading or Oxford to Leamington Spa, or Banbury or wherever it is that the Stratford train will go from (I'm guessing the answer would be yes, at least from Oxford, not least because Crosscountry is a sister-company of Chiltern) - however I suggest waiting for the finalised information including timetable to appear, by which time the answers to such questions may be clear.
By the way, are they definitely "
Advance" tickets (if so they should be marked as such in the 'ticket type' field), rather than tickets just bought in advance? (There is a difference!) Not that it would make a great deal of difference in terms of your routing.
However, I can see that Chiltern are
still selling Advance tickets for journeys on 25 April, even when they know that direct trains aren't going to run - that's pretty sloppy, the normal modus operandi is that Advance tickets are not sold until engineering works related changes are finalised. Poor show on their part.