Atomic Systems

would it be finacially possible and have a high enough demand for a reading circular via havant going both ways?
".............................................................................." portsmouth - alton service via guildford?

also some time last year i asked how our money reaches the TOC, and the person replied with along the lines of the suggest route or operator..... so if i went from portsmouth - weymouth and it told me to take a SWT train to soton and i took a FGW one in place FGW wouldn't have got my money?

From what I remember of this when I done some research, is that each operator gets a share of the fare price;

So when I pay £2.90 for a child ticket from Warrinton Stns to Manchester Stns, First TPE, Northern and EMT all run the Warrington Central to Manchester section along the south line, while ATW run from Warrington Bank Quay to Manchester Pic. So here each operator would get £0.72 each.

Or something along those lines

MoonKid47 wrote:From what I remember of this when I done some research, is that each operator gets a share of the fare price;

So when I pay £2.90 for a child ticket from Warrinton Stns to Manchester Stns, First TPE, Northern and EMT all run the Warrington Central to Manchester section along the south line, while ATW run from Warrington Bank Quay to Manchester Pic. So here each operator would get £0.72 each.

Or something along those lines

I think the share each operator gets is weighted depending on how many trains they run over the route, whether they get overtaken by another operartors trains and a few million other factors. An interesting point is that NXEC will get a portion of the London - Letchworth (and beyond, to Kings Lynn) fares, because they stop some trains at Stevenage, and it is a permitted route to travel on an NXEC train to there then change to an FCC train. This despite the fact that >95% of such journeys will be made exclusively on FCC trains.

As for Reading - Eastleigh - Havant - Guildford - Alton, there's no reason why that wouldn't be possible. I have no idea if there's any demand for such trains that isn't met by the existing services over those routes, and any such service would have to replace existing trains due to the single track sections between Eastleigh & Fareham and Farnham - Alton.

ORCATS - "Operational Research Computer Allocation of Tickets to Services" - a piece of software dreamt up in BR days as a child of revenue prediction software, and adapted to suit the privatised railway. Basically a big program which takes the entire weekday timetable, the national fares manual, and the national routeing guide and calculates how much revenue from each ticket sold should go to each operator.

ORCATS is liable to 'abuse' - such as East Midlands Trains planning to cut the scheduled journey times between Sheffield and London, to get a bigger slice of the pie (a few minutes saved can mean many millions to ORCATS, even if it has no effect on passenger's choices) - even though that may slightly undermine EMT's (former Midland Mainline routes) currently good performance. Also you can end up with what the industry calls an 'ORCATS Raid' - one operator running services ('non-franchised' services, above the Passenger Service Requirement) onto another's patch: for example, SWT's Waterloo-Bristol trains are an ORCATS raid on FGW.

mattvince wrote:ORCATS - "SWT's Waterloo-Bristol trains are an ORCATS raid on FGW.

I thought SWT's Bristol-Waterloo service was to replace the former Wales & Wessex service to Waterloo back in the day when the SRA was hot on the "one terminal, one operator" policy.

Presumably this software takes into account the number of seats or coaches on a service otherwise there's nothing to stop an operator running two short trains instead of one long one?

ForburyLion wrote:Presumably this software takes into account the number of seats or coaches on a service otherwise there's nothing to stop an operator running two short trains instead of one long one?

Doubtful. And there is something to prevent that - pathing. The kind of routes where an "orcats raid" will be worth doing are the kind of routes where paths will be at a premium (see ECML, with Hull Trains "Orcats-raiding" NXEC (Doncaster) and NXEC "orcats-raiding" Hull Trains at Retford. And then there's the Grand Central Train Robbery from York...)