I don't know where you were putatively travelling from, but from Bath Spa I can get both GWR.com and BRFares to work fine - but perhaps not by doing the obvious. It all depends on what you mean by "destination".

For BRFares, you enter an actual station as destination, but it lists tickets/fares under technical railway-internal destinations. To get offered travelcards, you need to enter a station you could get to using one. So that's a London terminus (Paddington), somewhere before that (e.g. Ealing Broadway), or somewhere beyond that (e.g. a tube station). You will then be offered a range of technical destinations, i.e. a station, London Terminals, or various of those weird zonal things; London Zones 1-6 should be offered if it's meaningful. In the list you get, for each of those there is a range of ticket types; for London Zones 1-6 you are only offered the various Travelcards.

For GWR, I picked Paddington as destination (though other valid travelcard destinations do work) and you then must choose a return and times both on the same day. In the list of trains you have to choose one to be offered a list of ticket types, and the day travelcards should be in that. (It does not seem to offer period travelcards if you specify a return on a later date.) Of course the actual train time chosen is now not important, though off-peak limits still apply.

 
An update, from the BBC:

 
The 'QR code style ticket could be programmed to work, but the magstrip tickets have only 8 bytes of data storage on them & writing used dates isn't possible in that space

 

More shoddy journalism. 

Yet again, historic pictures of Bristol Temple Meads being used to 'illustrate' any current news story about anywhere on the railways in the south of England.

How about being a professional journalist, and find this picture on the internet to illustrate your story, for example?



CfN. 

 
An update, from the BBC:

 
All sounds straightforward…not.

 
Official poster:

 
Tested the GWR app, and that fails in a different way, 'London Travelcard Zones 1-6' is findable, but 'No fares available'.

On the GWR web site, and logged in, and therefore the search being successful, regarding the ticket's restriction code, the site would still refer the user to the National Rail site, where they need to repeat the search. This is not trivial...

I've also tested brfares.com and *it* can't find e.g. 'London Travelcard Zones 1-6' so no avenue to check the restriction code there.

tl:dr - if you need a 'London Travelcard' destination use a ticket office or log in to the GWR app and that works. After which, take care not to be bitten by a ticket restriction as some of them aren't intuitive, especially if you're venturing into South Western Railways territory with a ticket covering a route that they've priced themselves.

Mark

 
From my email




and here's the covering letter that makes it clear it's an open / public meeting and gives more of the BRTA flavour

 
Ah: using the GWR web site, once you're logged in to your GWR account, 'London Travelcard Zones 1-6' is listed on the booking system and no need to go to the accessible version. What an odd quirk.

This isn't so helpful on, say, the national rail site as it doesn't run an account-based model and presumably remembers previous searches using cookies.

Mark

Update: using the above, the travelcard destinations might be findable but the system can then find no fares so this isn't working either. Use the accessible booking engine though, and tickets are found, priced and purchaseable

 
Ah. One way to find the likes of 'London Travelcard Zones 1-6' as a destination: use GWR's web site and switch to the accessible booking tool, and they're available there.

Mark

 
Checking various ticket sales sites + the national rail web site, within the last few days, the 'London Travelcard Zones 1-6' etc have gone from the list of destinations offered.

Mark

 
Why do "Freedom" tickets always (it seems) fail to operate station barriers?  And why are some staff so helpful and friendly with passengers using them, and others come across as agressive (almost the sort of behaviour which they announce will not be tolerated to staff - but it's OK for staff to make customers feel REALLY small!).

The explanation I have been offered (of the barriers) is that it's a two part ticket and they have to check the write-in section (and they sometimes do check it) but surely with gates so common these days, their systems could monitor the number of days the ticket has been used anyway, and catch people on their 4th day on a 3-of-7 or 9th day on an 8-of-15. Want a bit more than that?  Print a scan code onto the ticket!

 
Friday April 18

More points failures today:


Though it's most likely that the problem was at Oxford.
2E77 05:10 Oxford to Worcester Shrub Hill, the positioning journey for the 07:00, departed Oxford +60 and arrived Shrub Hill +79.
The 07:00 departed +39, running after 1P18 07:13 Great Malvern to London Paddington. It arrived Oxford +38 and was cancelled thereafter.

 
Which brings me back to my original point. Why was the bus not provided in the winter half of the year? (when while there may be fewer passengers overall, there will still have been a demand for it, and in winter weather the alternative walking route would be even worse to do).

 
Travel with South Western Railways, and because it's a system that registers you, the on train wifi will know who you are. I think it's that when you've not travelled for some time with them, this generates a request to fill in a survey so I had the opportunity to turn a blind eye to the lack of leg room and overall capacity and tell them how lovely their seating, staff and trains were.

The survey carefully avoids collecting journey start and end points, it only collects data on the segment of the journey that's on South Western Railway, and that, rail industry, flags the industry issue that train operating companies have gleefully siloed themselves and their passengers.

It's something that came up in conversation during the day as we gazed at the ongoing wreck of Basingstoke's Great Western Hotel, an outfit which finally came to a bad end.

The hotel, not the conversation that is, as the conversation touched on an observation from someone from a previous generation who'd worked in a series of southern towns served by both the GWR and other rail companies.

'Oh yes, the GWR, they made a point of never connecting with anything else unless they had to, and if it served a useful purpose to them, they didn't even connect with themselves'.

This put me in mind of the time that the loco-and-coaches day trip trains to the seaside ceased and unable to raise the day return fare, the railway had to kill the market, which they effectively did for the new epoch when the morning Bristol to Weymouth trains vanished from the timetable, being replaced by a connection and wait at Westbury, and the passengers melted away.

Mark

 
https://www.devonlive.com/news/devon-news/live-major-devon-train-disruption-10115423

Major problems on the Exmouth><Paignton route yesterday afternoon. Trespasser at Torre apparently. No trains between NTA & PGN for several hours and a number of cancelled or late services to/from EXM.

You have to love the stock image use to illustrate the story though!

 

At around 08:45, re-instated, I notice.

Damage already done - day planned and planned without a return to Melksham on those trains, comment made in public at https://www.passenger.chat/t30162.html and onto Facebook.

 
On 18th April, 1966, railway stations at Melksham and Devizes closed leaving Bradford-on-Avon as the only town in what is now the Melksham constituency with public transport by rail available.  Devizes remains isolated from the railway network, Melksham station reopened in 1985 but with a minimal service, and Bradford-on-Avon survived the low points (including suggestions that it too could close in the Serpell report) and it now thrives - with half a million passenger journeys every year, and 3 trains an hour headed for (and some beyond) Bath and Bristol, and 3 trains an hour headed for Trowbridge and Westbury, most going onwards to places like Salisbury, Southampton, Portsmouth, Frome, Yeovil and Weymouth.

Melksham has twice the population of Bradford-on-Avon, but passenger numbers there are around 75,000 per year - less that one sixth of the numbers using Bradford-on-Avon.  Why are the passenger numbers at Melksham so low?

1. The service has risen, but only a bit - after sporadic changes over the years from a minimal level to just an infrequent and badly connected one.   It is not the "turn up and go" service that BoA has.  I left this morning, headed south, on the 06:32 and if I had missed it the next train in this direction is not until 09:10.  I changed onto the Weymouth train at Westbury and expect to be there at 08:25, but on the 09:10 I would not expect to arrive into Weymouth until 12:10, with an 80 minute wait for connecting train at Westbury.

2. Services don't go where we want from Melksham - we need to change trains along the way.  That's not always an issue - except that as noted in (1) there are long waits for connections, or connections are a gamble that a train will be on time.  I was lucky this morning - my 2 minute change at Westbury worked.  Passengers on the 07:21 from Melksham, changing at Chippenham for Bath and Bristol - whet should be a major commuter train - tell me about the change "working" with the 4 minutes in the timetable sometimes, and failing at other times leaving them with half an hour to wait for the onwards train.  If that sounds bad, it's a much bigger problem on the way back, where a missed connection at Chippenham means at least an hour's wait and sometimes much more

3. Services that are in the timetable are cancelled on the day far too often. As I write this now (07:30, 18.4.2025) two afternoon services have shown up as "cancelled due to lack of staff" overnight and it's not an uncommon story.  The 17:35 off Swindon is typically the busiest train of the day, and that's one that has gone.  I saw relatives off on that train yesterday from Melksham; 24 people got off, 12 got on, and I estimate that around 100 people were using the train - a busy 2 carriage service.

4. Melksham Station has no ongoing public transport services that are practical to use within the town.  Recently, lip service has been provided with signing of bus stops that are up to a 8 minute walk away as "for railway station" but that's far too far from the station, no timetables are displayed to help you connect, and indeed they don't connect - it's pure luck as to how long you have to wait.  And while Melksham Station IS within walking distance of many homes and the start of the Town Centre, it's several miles from the main Bowerhill employment area, and also a long way from all the new housing to the east of Melksham where there is little employment and people really want and need to get to work in other towns.

5. People feel unsafe at and getting to Melksham Station. There are no staff there, and it's in the back of the industrial estate where there's often no-one else around, and no taxis.  The walk into town is through a subway which - while recently improved as a legal art wall - still concerns nervous travellers ... and then the walk on is beside a factory that shut down a couple of years ago to the derelict Unicorn pub.   Although the station is close to McDonald's - open long hours, shops and housing in north Melksham, it's not accessible from them without walking three times the distance, and through that subway and industrial estate.

6. Fare, journey opportunity information is complex and misleading at times and puts people off, even if they can find the journey they need - it IS out there but you need a doctorate level degree to understand the complexities, and know your rights and alternatives in the event of you changing your plans along the way / return plans or having changes enforced on you by trains or buses not running or missing connections.

This sounds like a tale of horror, doesn't it?   Yes and no - the story is that we have come forward so much in the last 15 years - from 3,000 to 75,000 journeys per annum, and we have identified the reasons that, we believe, they remain so much below the 500,000 journeys at BoA.   

We have a great deal to thank Great Western, and Wiltshire Council, and the DfT, and MPs of various parties for ... for their help and support thus far.  We have moved from a useless service to a one that is usable for some - note those 100 passengers on one of the 18 trains yesterday - and that makes a very real difference to the economy and strength of the area.

We have identified (I believe) the issues - listed above - that limit current passenger numbers and those same people who have helped thus far are too - and we are all together looking at overcoming those objections.  Not just looking at the problems, but looking at the solutions too.

More than half the people I talk to in Melksham are embarrassed that they don't use the train as much as they could because of [some combination of the above] and we know we have a potential user base once issues are sorted. And that's not just a narrow "use the railway" benefit - it's a huge benefit to the economy of the town, the area, the environment.    I look forward over the next few years to a time when most of the people I talk too ARE able to make appropriate use of our public transport, and that those who aren't using it are easily persuaded to try it purely by helping them learn about it and all the options available to them.

 

 
Quite coincidentally, yesterday, as my wife was clearing out some of her accumulated memorabilia from her service as a Merchant Navy officer with Cunard, she posed me a couple of questions about the sinking of the RMS Titanic:

1.  How many dogs survived?

2.  How many Engineer Officers survived?

The first I was unable to answer - but apparently, there were 12 dogs listed among the passengers on the Titanic, of whom four survived the sinking.

The second question was easy for me to answer: 'None of them' - they all went down with the ship, still working below. My wife and I chorused "That's why they wear purple on their uniforms."

 
Drivers point of view.

Ticket machine will have instructed the driver the card is hotlisted and should be retained.
A hotlisted card is one that’s reported lost, stolen or deceased. I don’t know what happens when handed in by driver but I assume destroyed.

I’m curious where Stagecoach come into the story, as Royal Parade to Plympton is operated by Plymouth Citybus (Go ahead group) (it says he was returning home, so assumed he was travelling to Plympton) 

 

Correct, whether it’s luggage or mobility, or pushchairs. The bus is booked May to October by GWR, when I worked for the bus company it was one of their most profitable contracts. Very little diesel used. Very few miles so little wear and tear.

I covered it a few times and went touting for trade on the platforms when trains arrived. Something to do!

 

I'm a bit confused. Isn't this shuttle bus just taking passengers from one platform to the other, for those who cannot manage the stairs? We had heavy luggage to carry, and it was a long walk around via the road.

 

It was quiet ... and a bit nasty with sand blowing unpleasantly on the north beach in January and passenger numbers were very well indeed within the capacity of the 2 carriage train.

 
From the BBC:

 

They do! I really struggled in January…