Great Western Coffee Shop

<edited extract>

You shell out thousands of pounds a year in exchange for half an hour standing with your face hidden behind the Daily Telegraph - or a copy of Metro - an elbow in the back, and from the public address system comes a series of garbled announcements about "the late running of this service".

Such is the caricatured experience of the commuter on Britain's expensive and overcrowded railways.

The arrival this week of a 6% hike in rail fares brought a mixture of weary resignation and anger from passengers. Season tickets to London from Stevenage reached ^3,200, Leeds to Sheffield ^2,148, and Manchester to Liverpool ^2,688. Swansea to Cardiff is now ^1,468 and Glasgow to Edinburgh is ^3,380.

Recent research by the Campaign for Better Transport suggested that season tickets for commuters around London cost more than three times those of their Spanish and German equivalents, and 10 times more than those in Italy.

Much of the anger seems to be focused in England, particularly in the South East and London. In Scotland, ticket prices tend generally to be lower, reflecting higher subsidies.

One of the most pricey routes in England is St Albans to London, where the season ticket of ^2,988 works out at 31p a mile, or ^10.60 for a single ticket at 52p a mile.

Sandy Walkington, the Liberal Democrat parliamentary candidate for St Albans in 2010, calculated in 2009 that the town had the most expensive commuter route in the country. With fares rising more or less uniformly since then, and British tickets the highest in Europe, he says that St Albans-London is now the most expensive commuter route in Europe.

But St Albans isn't the highest priced journey in the country. When the railways were privatised in 1995, commuter routes at peak times were capped by government, unlike their long distance equivalents.

So what is the country's most expensive stretch of railway? The obvious answer is the Heathrow Express, which clocks in at a rate of ^1.17 a mile. But this is a one-off route used mainly by business travellers.

To search for the most expensive journey is to plunge into a blizzard of complexity and opaque terms and conditions. The Association of Train Operating Companies (Atoc) says it operates services between 2,500 stations so cannot break them all down on a cost per mile basis.

Once upon a time, it would have been simple. Up until 1968 British Rail used a rigid price formula of 3.25d per mile (1.35p in decimal money).

(http://i598.photobucket.com/albums/tt68/bignosemac/ppmbbc.jpg)

So using the rigid BR price structure of ^1.35 per mile, Paddington - Penzance would cost ^412.

Almost ^300 more expensive than the current price.

Err..... no. The article converts the 1968 price of 3^d to a decimal figure of 1.35 pence per mile. It is not comparing 1968 prices with those of today.

Ahh, thought the BBC had been kind enough to convert old money to current money