atomsearch · Journey planning & fares
The engine that finds the journey — and the price.
atomsearch is our journey planning and fares engine: fast, accurate UK rail search with the split-ticketing technology behind FairSplits. It has answered every search on traintickets.com and powered Rail Europe's UK journey planning for eight years.
Talk to us about atomsearchJourney planning that earns its keep.
Most journey planners answer the easy question: how do I get from A to B? atomsearch answers the one that matters to a retailer: how do I get from A to B at the right price — every fare, every route, every restriction, resolved in one fast query.
It plans journeys across the full National Rail network, prices them against the complete UK fares data, applies railcards and discounts, and returns results fast enough to sit behind a consumer search box at scale. The same engine drives every search on our own retail site and our partners' — so its accuracy is tested by real customers, on real journeys, every minute of the day.
The split-ticketing engine behind FairSplits.
UK rail fares have a well-known quirk: a journey split into multiple tickets can cost less than a single through fare — same train, same seat, entirely within the rules. Finding those combinations quickly, across the whole fares dataset, is a genuinely hard search problem. Solving it is what atomsearch was built around.
FairSplits — our consumer-facing split ticketing on traintickets.com — runs on this engine, checking the combinations a conventional fares lookup never sees and presenting customers with a valid, often substantially cheaper way to make exactly the same journey. The same capability is available to partners through the API: offer split tickets under your own brand, with the hard part already solved.
Whole-dataset search
Combinations evaluated across the complete fares data, not a shortlist of known splits.
Valid by construction
Every result complies with ticketing rules; the train must call at the split points.
Retail-ready
Returned in the same response structure as through fares, ready to book via atomcore.
Built for retailers, not just routing.
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Full National Rail coverage
Journey planning and fares across the entire GB rail network.
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Complete fares intelligence
Through fares, split combinations, advance and walk-up tickets, with restrictions applied correctly.
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Railcards and discounts
Applied at search time, so customers see the price they'll actually pay.
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Group travel
The fares logic behind FairGroups, our group booking product on traintickets.com.
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Real-time aware
Live running and disruption information, reflected in journey results.
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Fast at retail scale
Built to sit behind consumer search on busy retail sites.
Tested by millions of real searches.
Every journey searched on traintickets.com runs through atomsearch. Rail Europe has used it for UK journey planning and fares for eight years, behind raileurope.com, their apps, their B2B agent platform and their distribution API. And our UK rail supply to Distribusion's global ground-transport network is planned and priced by the same engine.
Start the conversation.
Tell us what you're building — we'll tell you honestly whether and how the platform fits. You'll be talking to the engineers who own the company.
Talk to us about atomsearch