Portsmouth on September the 11th
This will be my next match following Ipswich Town.
It might also need a bit of planning to get round the various ticketing regulations on the trains.
The easiest way would be to turn up at Whittlesford and buy a return ticket for Fratton, which is the nearest station to the ground. But this might be a problem as the ticket office there was unmanned yesterday and the automatic machine had been positioned so that the morning sunlight made it difficult to read.
Badly-Sited Ticket Machine at Whittlesford
These people were certainly having problems, so buying a ticket or collecting it from there might be a problem. I suppose I could get my ticket posted to my home.
So I think that I might take the train from Dullingham and go via Cambridge and King’s Cross, as I can buy a ticket from the conductor on the train. King’s Cross to Waterloo is also easier on the Underground than Tottenham Hale to Waterloo.
But the problem is that I can’t get a taxi at Dullingham, but I can pre-book one at Whittlesford.
But there is an additional complication. I want to have lunch with a friend at Micheldever, which is on the line to Fratton. So my journrey will actually be in three legs; Whittlesford to Micheldever, Micheldever to Fratton and Fratton to Whittlesford. It used to be that if you broke a journey and then continued on a later train in the same direction, that you could do this on the same ticket. I suspect this is now off the menu.
What is needed is a simple multiple ticket web site, where I enter the trains I want to travel on and then they post them to my house or I pick them up reliably at the first station.
I suspect that because of regulations though, I’ll need to buy a Whittlesford-Fratton return and buy an extra single ticket to get from Micheldever to Fratton.
And people think I’m getting paranoid!
Since I wrote that, I’ve found another problem. Not all trains to Fratton start from Waterloo and those of those that do not all go through Michedever, but the booking sites don’t seem to say which. It’s all very complicated. The Internet is supposed to make things simple not more difficult. Perhaps it would be easier to turn up and go at Waterloo and buy the tickets there. But that would mean I would have to leave earlier in the morning!
The Anonymous Widower 
[…] to South West Trains in the post, where I outlined how I could get to Portsmouth on September 11th, I assumed that I would no longer […]
Pingback by Apologies to South West Trains « The Anonymous Widower | August 30, 2010 |