When you buy a train ticket between two stations in Britain, the
National Routeing Guide — not common sense, and not the
quickest itinerary — decides which physical routes that ticket lets you take.
RailRouter reads an offline copy of that Guide, plus the timetable, fares and
ticket-restriction feeds, and shows you what it actually says.
It keeps four questions deliberately separate and never lets one answer stand in
for another:
Which routes does the Guide describe? Enumerated from the Guide's own map data, not guessed from geography.
Can a real train do it that day? Checked against imported timetable data.
What does a ticket cost, and what are its rules? From the retail fares and restrictions feeds.
If the Guide route is impractical, what else runs? Shown, but never dressed up as a Guide route.
This is a local research tool built from public data feeds. It is not
the National Routeing Guide itself and must not be used to decide whether a ticket
is valid. Check with the retailer or operator before you travel.
Offline explorer · UK National Routeing Guide
Which way are you allowed to go?
Your ticket between two British stations permits a specific set of routes — often
far more than the obvious one. RailRouter shows you those routes, whether a train
actually runs them, and what the fare rules say.
Pick one of the Routeing Guide corridors, reverse it for the return, and try
staying a few nights along the way. Every stop has to sit on that corridor, and a
real timetable segment has to exist between each pair of dates.
