walkingsophie

With my proposal of

Using just contactless payments for flexible travellers in conjunction with advance tickets as the only options available would be a way to solve this.

in the situation you have described, the person with a possibility of change of plans could have used contactless rather than an advance ticket.

If the railway company doesn't like this, they can assign prices to make this impossible.

The British railway companies do not seem to be doing a good job at assigning prices to make this impossible, despite not liking it.

Often there are multiple valid ways to use a ticket, so the product you are being sold is something of the form "choose one of Pushchair Bundle, Powerbank, or Handbag" rather than just being a Pushchair Bundle. Railways need to price the tickets based on all the various available routes, and some routes end up containing parts that travel a longer/more valuable distance then the other routes, making it difficult to give fares that make logical sense with your definition. The rail industry sometimes has ways to fix this for specific journeys, but given the ... (read more)

To me the main problem with respect to routeing seems to stem from break of journeys being allowed, and all the implications of that. My mole in the previous post stems from this, as without allowing break of journeys you would only be able to do the journey A-D with an A-D ticket, as the railways intended. Using just contactless payments for flexible travellers in conjunction with advance tickets as the only options available would be a way to solve this.

However with all the hardware being built around break of journeys being allowed, getting to the state... (read more)

Until recently, it seemed impossible to learn a language without either
...

This does not fully line up with my experience learning languages, so I would like to see a source or evidence backing up this claim.

I know this is an anecdote, but I have learnt a significant amount of Japanese by just listening to podcasts, including on topics too abstract or too disconnected from me to have sensory experiences on, and I personally do not see why you can't learn a language from nothing but the language itself.

This reminds me of the British Rail ticketing and fares system, where people try to find cheap tickets and travel at the times they want, and the railway operators try get people to pay for the trains they use and balance the people out between trains.

As a simple example of a mole, there are quite a few train routes A-B-C-D around the UK where a ticket from A-D is cheaper than a ticket from B-C, but still valid to do the journey B-C. (For example a ticket from Mortlake to Ash is valid to do the journey from Clapham Junction to Guilford, but is cheaper than... (read more)