I'm booked with some visitors from the US on the 0930 from London Marylebone to Stratford-upon-Avon on 25 April 2011. Chiltern has finally announced their engineering work for that day, and it's clear as mud. The National Rail site has better info than Chiltern's site, but I still can't tell if my train is impacted. I'm guessing the answer is going to be yes, but I can't tell for sure.

They suggest that FGW will be accepting Chiltern tickets from Paddington to Oxford, which I would prefer to buses on rail replacement. However, I have no idea how to figure out which train we'd be trying to catch at Oxford. Is this something that more details will be forthcoming on at a later time, or am I supposed to figure it out from just what's been given so far?

Thanks in advance for any help or advice you can give.

Yes, it looks like every train will be affected because the line out of Marylebone is totally closed on that day for works.

The crucial phrase on the National Rail site is this one:
"Trains to/from Birmingham will start from / terminate at Oxford or Bicester North. [...]"

i.e. south of King's Sutton station, some Chiltern trains will be diverted on a different line to Oxford instead of using the normal line, whilst other Chiltern trains will use the normal line for a short distance but then terminate at Bicester North (there'll be no trains running south of Bicester North station).

You've basically understood it right - travel from Paddington to Oxford on a First Great Western train (of which there are many), then change there for a (diverted) Chiltern train to Stratford (which will start from Oxford). It's possible that the Chiltern trains from Oxford won't be going to Stratford (they might be the ones starting from Bicester North) but will be heading to Birmingham instead, in which case you'd need to change again at Banbury for a Stratford bound train - in the absence of a timetable being made available, one cannot tell, but it should be available sooner or later.

The engineering works map (PDF) on the National Rail site is useful - you might like to compare it to Chiltern's regular route map (PDF), where you can see that in normal conditions they run a handful of services to/from Oxford (only late at night I think).

These changes aren't yet appearing in the journey planners presumably because the temporary timetable hasn't yet been finalised - there's a lot of upgrade work happening on the Chiltern route at the moment which is running behind schedule, which might help to explain matters, but it certainly seems pretty slack that they don't appear to have worked out exactly what they're going to do in terms of what trains they're going to run yet.

And as a wider comment, yes, engineering works information often leaves something to be desired - pieceing together exactly what the plans are can sometimes feel like you're a latter day Sherlock Holmes searching for clues - one thing that should be remembered however is that trains can be diverted to run on all sorts of unusual routes, which can serve to confuse if you're not aware that certain connections exist.

I live on this line. We've got off lightly as they were going to shut for two weeks solid.

Anyway, in the past Stratford has been served by a shuttle from Leamington Spa, so you'll be looking at three trains minimum. This should however give you the option of taking Cross Country from Reading or Oxford to Leamington.

Is it worth seeing if you can go via Birmingham (so Virgin up there, then whoever operates straight down to Stratford)?

The replacement timetable should go up very soon - click through from here http://www.chilternrailways.co.uk/ti...-times/changes

Thanks for the clarifications. I guess I'll check the timetables closer to the time. Was figuring we'd probably wind up changing at Oxford and Banbury after seeing the map. So if we have advance tickets on a particular train, is this going to be one of those days where they're reasonably flexible about which train you're on, given the mess?

This makes me feel a lot better. I was looking at the information (and Chiltern's site is incomprehensible) and feeling like an idiot trying to decipher what was going on. Glad to know that's the way it is for lots of people.

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.

[Edit - this post crossed with yours mtkeller]

It can sometimes help to see the whole picture - there are a number of maps of the railway network on the National Rail website here.

The very detailed 'Zoomable version showing Train Operators (all stations shown)' map is a bit hectic, but it does give some idea about how things fit together - that's this one.

I think I'd probably stick with going via Oxford rather than up to Birmingham then back down to Stratford. (And whilst changing at Reading is indeed a possibility, it's a busy station with lots of platforms, so for the sake of simplicity I'd suggest catching a direct train from Paddington to Oxford where the interchange would be much simpler - there's only three platforms, and I imagine the Chiltern train will use the bay platform.)

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.

Yes, definitely advance and routed Chiltern only. (Still learning lots of things about the trains over here, but advance vs. single vs. off-peak vs. off-peak return/day return, etc. I've got a feeling for the basic differences. If only it were clearer which services are really off-peak since there's about 100 exceptions. I usually resort to doing a mock booking to see if they'll sell me an off-peak for a particular train.)

I thought it was weird that they were selling the tickets when they weren't sure what was going to be happening, but I figured at �7.50 apiece it was a good deal even if we got stuck on a bus for part of it.

I think that's the easiest way of doing it - it's how I do it at least. FWIW, I find the booking system used on the East Coast site is the best - it looks a bit confusing at first, but once you've got the hang of it, you'll see it's actually got quite a powerful interface. The same system is used on the Chiltern, Southern, Southeastern and London Midland sites too. The main alternative booking system used by other train companies' sites is the one based on TheTrainline's interface, which is rather more basic. (Tip - don't ever book directly with TheTrainline, as it charges a �1 booking fee, plus an extra fee for paying with a credit card - if you prefer the Trainline interface, then use say First Great Western's booking site instead and avoid these fees.)

I imagine you know this already, but you can book any tickets using any site, though some companies offer discounts if you book directly with them when travelling on their trains (e.g. East Coast offer a 10% discount on Advance fares on their trains if you book the tickets on their site).

It's not the way things are normally done, no. I think the underlying issue here is perhaps just that these upgrade works are running significantly behind schedule - the eventual masterplan is for Chiltern to be able to offer faster journeys on their route between London and Birmingham, which they're calling "Chiltern Mainline".

Very good points, and I think I shall flag this explanation to give to the next group of Marshall Scholars/Marshall Sherfield Fellows coming over next year. We were pointed toward The Trainline upon arrival, so I think many started booking there. I booked on The Trainline once and got socked by their booking fee and CC fee. Quickly realized I could use AmEx on the TOC sites and not pay booking or CC fees. I agree about the power of the East Coast system and love them discounting their tickets when booked through them. I'm using them to go from Edinburgh to Aberdeen in a couple of weeks and got a nice price on a first class advance ticket with their 10% discount.

(Erm, sorry, this was just going to be a quick note but it's sort of ballooned into a bit of an epic!)

Well, there is another school of thought which says that individual train companies offering such discounts just makes it that much more complicated to ensure that one secures the best price - the alternative approach would be all outlets offering all tickets at the same price regardless. (The 10% online discount offered by East Coast is after all just a discount on a fare that the company itself has set - it could just cut the underlying fare instead.)

Anyway, whilst I'm here, I might as well tell you a few extra bits and pieces which could help scholars, or indeed anyone else, stretch their budgets that little bit further...


* First off, the booking sites that use the East Coast system don't offer the GroupSave discount whatsoever - GroupSave is an offer that applies in the south east of England (the definition of which is drawn pretty widely) whereby 3 or 4 people can travel together for the price of 2 during off-peak times - this applies to 'walk-up' tickets rather than 'Advance' ones (which are basically only offered on a few routes in the south east). Trainline-based sites can offer this, though rather unintuitively you have to tick the 'Railcard' box then select either 'GroupSave' 3 or 'GroupSave 4' as appropriate - to be honest I generally wouldn't bother booking GroupSave tickets in advance but would just buy them on the day (from staffed ticket offices - self-service ticket machines don't offer this discount either ), but it can be a useful way of pricing up journeys or confirming the availability of the GroupSave discount for particular journeys.


* Secondly, East Coast has recently started offering a third-off discount for groups of 3-9 people on their Advance fares (both Standard and First class). Virgin Trains also offers a discount for small groups, though it's rather less generous.


* Thirdly, something that might well confuse you - well it confuses me a bit, and I'm the one trying to explain it! However, it's also kinda useful too. Virgin Trains offers something unique for those travelling on the west coast main line - if you are making a return journey, then you can mix and match an Advance ticket for one direction and an Off-peak or Anytime 'half' ticket for the other direction - these 'half' tickets are priced at half the Off-peak or Anytime return fare (regular Off-peak Single fares are not, by and large, half the return fare - for intercity journeys they're normally just a pound cheaper than the return - don't ask, that's just the way it is!).

All this means that you can, for example, get a cheap Advance ticket for an outbound journey on a specific train (or just get a more reasonable fare for travelling on a peak time train), and then retain some flexibility as to when you make your return journey (though the 'half' ticket does have to be used on the specified day, and if it's an Off-peak ticket it can only be used during the off-peak window). In actual fact you can also mix and match Off-peak and Anytime 'halves' too - much cheaper than buying the full-whack Anytime Return ticket, and also somewhat cheaper than buying a walk-up Anytime Single and a walk-up Off-peak Single (remember, regular Off-peak Singles are not priced at half the Off-peak Return fare!).

You can only buy these 'half' tickets as part of a return journey when booking online in advance of travel on either the Virgin Trains website, or on any other Trainline-based booking site - they cannot be bought from station ticket offices (nor are they available from websites that use the East Coast booking system, which is annoying). Also worth noting that when buying from Trainline-based sites (which includes Virgin Trains), it takes up to two hours for the booking to process through the system and the tickets to be available for collection - so don't buy a mix-and-match duo of Off-peak and Anytime 'halves' online if you want to actually get on the train within the next hour! (FWIW, tickets purchased on sites that used the East Coast sites seem to be available for collection pretty much immediately - but of course you can't buy these 'half' tickets from them! )

(All that said, if Virgin lose the franchise to run the west coast main line next year, then these useful 'half fares' might end up being history anyway!)


* Lastly (and about time too, I hear you say!), there's something called Megatrain - basically the Megabus coach company offers some cheap tickets, on a few select trains, on a limited number of routes, which can only be purchased from their website. I dare say this is only of marginal interest to people here, given the limited number of cheap tickets on offer on awkwardly timed trains, and I think they're only offered on weekday trains, and perhaps not even on Fridays either. (The rationale here is that Megabus is a Stagecoach company, and these cheap train tickets are offered on underutilised trains operated by Stagecoach-owned train companies - or in the case of Virgin Trains, 49% owned by Stagecoach.)


Anyway, why are we talking about trains - surely you should be asking how to fly to Stratford upon Avon?

They've been switching the closures back and forth in recent weeks. Sometimes the Chiltern trains run to Oxford/Bicester, other times they're running them down to Princes Risborough, across to Aylesbury then into London from there. Obviously depends on what they're trying to fix that week...

You can follow @chilternrailway on Twitter if you want. Their customer service is quite responsive through that channel FWIW.

No, no, April's for trains and May is for flying for me this year (Coventry, Edinburgh, Aberdeen, Dundee, Paris, Stratford upon Avon all by train in April. In May, flying to AMS, RUH, TLV (via FCO), and SEA (via ATL, back via DTW, really going to YYJ on the ferry).

Thanks for all the thoughts. I've seen Megatrain and said "Uh, I'm not a student any more, I'm not taking trains at odd hours of the day on strange routings just to save a few quid." Thanks for explaining the Virgin trains thing. I think I benefitted from one of those when I booked my ticket to Coventry. Got an Advance on the way out but the return is an off peak single at just under half of what it normally would be. I don't think I even realized the return was just an off-peak until I got the tickets, expecting to have specific trains both directions. Since I'm up for a conference, it's nice to have flexibility coming back.

I actually tried that this morning and didn't get a reply. Probably because they aren't sure what's going on yet. I'm just a bit Type A on planning and want everything resolved well in advance. Sometimes I need to chill a bit, I guess.

Ugh. Chiltern are making a mess of this. They've published timetables for Monday. However, they don't jive with what the instructions on the engineering work summary says. The summary says to take FGW to Oxford and join the Chiltern services there. However, the posted timetable for Easter Monday doesn't have any Chiltern services from Oxford. (The one for Easter Sunday, however, does.) Do I need to call Chiltern about this? National Rail Enquiries is routing Oxford to Stratford-upon-Avon that day using XC to LMS and then Chiltern. Chiltern says nothing about anyone other than FGW accepting their tickets, but I have no freakin' clue how I should get from Oxford to anywhere using Chiltern on Monday. Hoping someone can help me out here.

Thanks!