Train/Tube Fare Map

drspa44

Hello fellow money-savers,
I am a bit obsessed with saving money on train fares and I am also a software engineer who likes maps so I created http://faremap.ml . It is free/non-commercial and open-source and there's no affiliate links or ads or nonsense.

Its purpose is to display UK train and Oyster fares on a colourful map, so that you can work out optimal journeys. I have also pre-computed every split ticket combination and these are displayed all at once. Feel free to have a play and tell me what you think. If you can, use Chrome on desktop - it is very graphics-heavy and is more usable with a mouse.

Please take the results with somewhere between a pinch and a truckload of salt. Many of the split tickets are only for the most dedicated individuals - my Dijkstra implementation does not care if you'd have to wait hours changing at a station receiving only a few trains per day! There's more caveats in the About section of the website.

martindow

Although it offers a very cheap fare it is suggesting splitting at stations that fast trains don't stop at. For example Reading to Manchester Piccadilly suggests splitting at seven stations like Cholsey and Norton Bridge. This would involve using stopping trains and I think the journey would take most of the day.


There is some very creative splitting going on here but it needs to be customisable so you could restrict splits to main stations or specific companies.

dggar

martindow wrote: »

Although it offers a very cheap fare it is suggesting splitting at stations that fast trains don't stop at. For example Reading to Manchester Piccadilly suggests splitting at seven stations like Cholsey and Norton Bridge. This would involve using stopping trains and I think the journey would take most of the day.


There is some very creative splitting going on here but it needs to be customisable so you could restrict splits to main stations or specific companies.

According to the National Rail site Norton Bridge is closed.
http://www.nationalrail.co.uk/stations_destinations/NTB.aspx

glennevis

First journey I tried gave out of date info; VTEC TOC no longer exists, now run by LNER.
You need to keep an eye on developments in the railway industry, including station closures.

agrinnall

Some of the problems reported above suggest that you have built your own databases rather than interrogate the source data in real time. There may be good performance reasons for this but you need to have frequent updates (I'd suggest every night) to ensure that the data you are relying on is accurate. If you tell people to do things that are simply not possible then you'll quickly get bad reviews and your customer base will dwindle away to nothing.

drspa44

I don't have a customer base, as there is nothing for sale. All of the data comes from ATOC, which they release every 6 months. Norton bridge station may be closed, however you can still buy tickets to it. I am not keen on manually correcting their data, because i would then have to maintain it and it will make updating very difficult. Also, i think the license forbids me doing this.

There already exist websites that show convenient split ticket options. The split ticket results can easily be ignored if they are not for you. As stated before, this is a non commercial website that caters to people interested in the data or who are willing to inconvenience themselves to save money.