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In the ticketing system of the British rail network, tickets are normally issued to and from individual stations. In some instances, when there is more than one station in a town or other locality—especially where these are on different routes—it may be desirable for passengers to be able to travel to one station and back from another, or more generally to be able to choose which of the stations they wish to travel to. To accommodate this requirement, British Rail introduced a series of station groups: notional "common locations" to which tickets from stations outside that group would be issued. For example, Penge in South London has two stations: Penge East and Penge West. The former is served by trains from London Victoria to Orpington; the latter is on the route from London Bridge to West Croydon. For a traveller arriving at, for example, a London terminal station and intending to go to Penge, it makes little difference which route is chosen. Both stations are close together and serve the same area. Therefore, a ticket issued specifically to one of the Penge stations would be unduly restrictive—it would remove the opportunity to travel by a choice of equally convenient routes. A notional "Penge group" solves this problem: a ticket issued in this way would be interavailable. The concept is explained in the National Fares Manuals (NFMs) issued approximately three times per year by the British Railways Board (and, since privatisation, by the Association of Train Operating Companies) to stations, Rail Appointed Travel Agents and other ticket issuing authorities: "Fares for certain ... cities and towns are shown to and from a notional common station() All fares are quoted and all tickets should be issued to and from (notional group ) stations except for local journeys between two stations in the same group. Tickets issued to and from these (group ) stations are valid to or from any of their associated stations, subject to normal route availability." ==Terminology and appearance on tickets== These "locations" had to be shown in a standard, easily identifiable way on tickets. The method chosen by the British Railways Board was as follows: * Take the name of the actual location where the stations are: for Penge East and Penge West, PENGE. * Add the suffix BR to this: PENGE BR. Each station group was also allocated its own National Location Code (NLC)—a four-digit code used for accounting and to attribute revenue to locations on the railway network. Most station group codes were between 0250 and 0500. This NLC appeared on PORTIS/SPORTIS tickets, which by convention always showed the "origin" and "destination" NLCs as well as the code of the issuing point; but tickets from the APTIS system and its replacements always showed the NLC of the actual station of issue, even where a ticket was issued from a "station group" (except for some short-lived anomalies). After privatisation, the designation "BR" was no longer appropriate, although having been in use for more than 10 years it had become a convenient shorthand device for referring to the station groups concept in general (for example, National Fares Manuals continued to use the term "BR Stations").〔 A new designation had to be created which still took up little space on a ticket (location names are restricted to 16 characters on most ticket issuing systems) and which still conveyed a notion of interavailability. The solution, introduced gradually from November 1997 and uploaded to all ticket issuing systems by January 1998, was for BR to be changed to STNS or STATIONS as appropriate: * STNS if the location name was between 8 and 11 characters in length: for example, LIVERPOOL BR became LIVERPOOL STNS. * STATIONS if the location name was 7 characters or fewer: for example, DORKING BR became DORKING STATIONS. There were some deviations from this standard: * As GAINSBOROUGH is 12 characters in length, a meaningful abbreviation to signify the station grouping could not be created. Therefore, tickets to the Gainsborough "group" are now issued simply to GAINSBOROUGH. * Although GLASGOW STATIONS was seen briefly on some systems in 1998, the designation for the Glasgow "group" was quickly changed across the board to GLASGOW CEN/QST, representing Glasgow Central and Glasgow Queen Street (the two main termini in the city). The change was made in mid-April 1998. * The London group was changed three times. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Station group (railway)」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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