Great Western Coffee Shop

from Christian Wolmar (https://www.christianwolmar.co.uk/2021/11/letter-to-the-times-rail-fares-need-sorting/)


He's right and it's being oft said apart (it seems) by the DfT and SWR ... and, yes, CW has said it before too.   He goes on to say how headline fares, even if very few people actually but the anytime open returns for intercity travel, provided a marketing own goal.

And as has been discussed here, ticket machines don't always make it easy to get the cheap(est) fares.

There is a generally held view that rail travel not only very expensive but also exceedingly complex.
The fare payable is often regarded as being down to luck rather than being determined by any logical process.

I have long held the view that rail fares should be greatly simplified with only three different fares payable for a journey, only two fares for a local journey.

I see no merit in charging punitively high fares for last minute walk-up use of a lightly loaded train. Nor in offering discounted advance tickets for a service known to be overcrowded.

If HMG are serious about climate change, then rail needs to be simpler, and on all but very busy trains, cheaper.

Whereas actual policies to date have been to make air and road transport cheaper whilst rail fares rise every year and also tend to become more complex.

HMG want rail - like all business - to pay for itself, high fares help this, balanced by trimming expenditure through destaffing etc.
The British do not do social services - run just for social benefit by the nation, they're always somehow run as/by private businesses.

Blimey, someone had better tell the NHS, quick!

In a couple of weeks I need to travel to Plymouth for 1000 and have been looking at the rail options.  The train that beat suits my needs leaves St Austell at 0844, one minute before Devon and Cornwall Railcard becomes valid.  Looked at splits and can split at Lostwithiel and get D&C railcard discount on an off peak return on the same train and pay peak return to Lostwithiel. This only appear possible  Lostwithiel has a different validity code (W4) on off peak to other stations (W2) making the off peak available earlier.

How many passengers simply pay (or don’t) the £19.20 anytime day return instead of the £11.75 option with a D&C Railcard and split at Lostwithiel?

What about regional airports then ? Subsidising them seems to be regarded as a good thing in order to encourage more flying improve regional connectivity.

That you can save over a third of the price by knowing such things is an example of how geeky rail fares have become. It's sometimes said that railways have followed the discount airline model of pricing, with cheaper tickets if you book ahead – but if airlines followed the railway model, you would need to know the ICAO code, choose the flight which takes a particular path and flight level, and check in from one specified counter. Ryanair and their ilk are rightfully criticised for some of their pricing policies but mostly they seem to be based on material factors: are you travelling at a popular time, from/to a popular airport, are you taking luggage which requires extra handling, do you expect a meal and entertainment included in the ticket price? To get a cheaper air ticket requires accepting some sacrifices in comfort and convenience, but no specialist knowledge.

Not many flights make stops en-route, which is where many of the fares anomalies for the railways occur, with zonal railcards and time restrictions adding an extra layer of potential problems. 

It would be very hard to remove many anomalies without making shorter journeys more expensive or longer journeys cheaper - both of which have their drawbacks.

It might be worth learning from SNCF, they are slashing off peak ticket prices, and have a simple online fare offer that just gives you an advance or  a walk- up price. Very high fares for peak  TGV trains, lower for off peak, and strong subsidies from regional government for local trains. Its not rocket science!

I see considerable merit in this simpler structure, but I have never seen the point in reduced fares for advanced bookings, whether in the UK or in France.

Higher fares for busy or peak trains makes sense, providing extra capacity is expensive and those who travel at peak times should contribute to the cost of extra stock and other capacity enhancements.

But for what logical reason should travel on a known busy train be cheaper if booked 20 days in advance, rather than 20 minutes before departure ?

And likewise, for what logical reason is last minute travel on a lightly loaded train so expensive ?

[advocate mode=devil]Desparate or unprepared people will pay desperate sums?  Look not at what it costs to provide the service but the elestacity of passenger numbers versus the price charged.  For example, I have a train with 150 seats on it, 50 of which have been sold 3 or more days ahead.   I then have 100 seats which I can sell on the day.   If I charge £10 each, 70 people will buy them and I get £700 of income. But if I charge £30 each and 40 people still need to travel, I gain £1200 pounds of income.  I like that for my business, and it means that not only do I get more income, but also I have 60 more seats to sell and grow my market as opposed to just 30 seats.   Only when I start charging £60 pound each and find I have just 10 customers on the day have I broken the model - but that's still £600 of income which is not far down on the £700, and I probably have less cleaning to do from the quieter train ... less free snacks to serve if I offer them ... less chance of being too busy to collect all the fares ... hey, less of them pesky customers![/advocate] 

That's not quite true though really, is it? Beeching set out to make the railway pay for itself, but it was quickly determined that London would have to be a special case. This concept of the 'social railway' later evolved to cover some areas outside London, though not before much of the country had lost its service.

And the railway has been nationalised in all but name since 1948, run in large part for the social benefit of the nation.

Roads, schools, hospitals, emergency services, justice, defence, environmental protection, planning, housing, food standards, waste management, welfare benefits, national and local parks, research and innovation funding, health & safety, consumer protection, competition regulation, arts & culture...

Apart from those, what has government ever done for us?

There is charging what the market will bear (a business practice that most companies indulge in) but there is also the risk of putting potential customers off because they get the wrong impression. Take the walk-up return fares Bath to Paddington as an example:

Anytime return £214.20
Off peak £86.80
Super off peak £63.00

If and when the media talk about the cost of rail travel between Bath and London, which one do they quote? You know as well as I do, and it ain’t £86.80 or £63.00...

This won’t off people like me who just get irritated every time I hear it. It probably wouldn’t put off many regular rail passengers who know they can get a better deal than that quoted either by tailoring their travel times or splitting or both.

But for the leisure traveller who never uses trains and wants to take the family for a nice day trip to London?

“Good God Mavis, the train fare to London is over £1.00 a mile for each of us and over half that for the kids. I’ll go and out some petrol in the car...”

And of course they also know that all trains are always late if they run at all because the media tells them that too.

I've never heard the news media say, "all trains are always late..."

Vox pops once in a while on/in the media, maybe. But not the media itself.

Many aspects of the fare system were "unfit for purpose" even before covid, and it was structured in such a way that the only great and natural headlines come for the anytime return fares - everything else so complex and mixed up that it doesn't make good comparative headlines.   After covid, I question most/many of the remaining shreds of fitness in current fare structures - although we do need to ask "what is purpose"?



"Mavis" is by now more a grandparent than a parent and can also save money on the one trip with a senior railcard. She may still be fit and well and able to drive long distances but I hope she has trimmed back or will over coming years on these long distance drives.  For sure, the leisure / group offerings are amongst the aspects that need careful examination.

Popularity graph for forename "Mavis" ( from https://nameberry.com/babyname/Mavis ) over the years (sorry, US data, but I suspect similar pattern to UK). Scale on left hand side is ranking so - for example - Mavis in 1930s was about the 230th most popular name.
(http://www.wellho.net/pix/mavis.jpg)

Edit to add Mavis graphic sources

....alternatively Mavis, her husband and both children could go Bath-London Victoria with National Express for around £75 return total for all four of them.

That perhaps puts rail fares into perspective.

An attractive offer for some, but takes twice as long by coach and there’s only a quarter of the frequency compared with rail.

True, and the context is leisure travellers for whom speed is less important, and of course you're guaranteed a seat, which may well be more important.

.....and if you're on a budget, looking at cost and prefer having more money to spend when you get to London rather than spending hundreds of £ just getting there, well it's a very appealing option.

Or as little as £26.82 return for four (two child fares), with approximately hourly departures, on Megabus.

We do. I expect rail operators, government, passengers, and even rail staff and RoSCos have different ideas on this.

I went on National Express from Plymouth to London once. Never again, absolute agony.Took for ever.

Exactly the thoughts that put me off applying for "Race across the World" - and delighted to have been put off when we watched the second series ...

I gave it a go on several occasions (5 I think) when I had to travel from Plymouth back to London on a Sunday during the Dawlish debacle & the trains were hopelessly unreliable on Sundays during BBQ season.

I have to say my experience doesn't match yours. It wasn't as comfortable as the train but I'm not sure where the agony came from?

It took about as long as was advertised when I booked the ticket.

It was always on time, practically to the minute ,clean & a fraction of the price of the train.

Nowadays I just avoid travelling on Sundays wherever possible!

Such coach services help to keep the advance rail fares down as well, so everyone’s a winner.  £73.10 return on advance fares with a railcard for two adults and two children.  Also ‘guaranteed’ a seat.

I have always considered buses and coaches to be inferior to trains as regards comfort and facilities, however as trains get worse the gap is narrowing.

Playing around with dates on the Megabus site, the £26.82 seems to be a standard price, whether travel is today, tomorrow, next month – and amendable up to 24 hours before departure. How can they be so much cheaper than trains? Are their SMT philanthropists dedicated to providing cheap public transport with no profit for themselves? Unlikely. Are they experts in efficiency, cutting costs to the bone and maximising utilisation of resources? Perhaps, but that probably only accounts for a small part of the difference. If we want to find the difference, we should probably look at how roads are paid for.

It can be argued that it's justified to headline with the walk-up anytime return. This is what the one-off traveller has to pay if they need to travel and do not have a choice - travelling on a train for which the season ticket holder in the seat next to them might be paying ~£41 return.

The 'Charge what the market will bear' policy has strengths too, but companies also flourish when they foster long term relationships with their customers.

It can be argued that transport shares qualities with air and water. They're all three essential to living - transport less so than air or water. Companies can adopt a very profitable model - one that asphyxiates the current generation of customers, but they then need a plentiful supply to replace them. In a crowded country, perhaps that's where we are with rail fares.

This thread was titled “High Fares – a deterrent to passenger numbers” and that was the context in which my post was written last night.

All of us on this forum will know that there are scores of different fares available for a Bath to London journey other than the anytime “any permitted route” one that the media quotes, but to an extent that is not the point.

My point was that this fare, as quoted, to a non-railway user, plants the impression in their minds that all railway fares are similarly extortionate, and so yes these will deter new business.

I heard a woman rabbitting on radio 4 a couple of weeks ago and I forget the actual figures, but she said something on the lines of “a train ticket from London to Glasgow costs £400 and a plane ticket costs £43.” So it’s all very well taking the view that the anytime price must be quoted because “all the other fares are so complicated” but comparisons like that are being made – and are being heard and believed – by non-rail travellers who will form a view based on this disinformation.

I have told the story before of an old school friend of mine who has lived in Germany for 40 years and, when he came over a couple of years ago, he wanted us to go to the Steam museum at Swindon. He planned to drive from Bristol, pick me up in Chippenham, and then drive on to Swindon. When I asked him what was wrong with the train, the reply I got was on the lines of he thought he’d have to take on a second mortgage for the fare “because UK train fares are so expensive.” It could be argued he should have known better, but the simple fact is that he believed what he’d been told by the media – and not just here, also in Germany!

Many people would baulk at a £214 rail fare from Bath to London. Quite a few would baulk at a fare of half that price, but in my view the railway are doing themselves no favours. They may well think that they are “charging what the market will bear” but I suspect the size of the market that will bear that price is dwarfed by the size of the market that would bear a more reasonable one.

Perhaps it’s time for the sales forecasters to get their spreadsheets out.

Also remember too that the airlines don’t quote their walk-up fares when they advertise – they usually publicise their lowest fare and then add the add-ons later when the customer is hooked.

Finally it was interesting to see so much made of me using the name “Mavis.” Whilst it is true that the name has fallen from favour amongst the white British, that might not necessarily be the case for people with other skin tones. That subject might be a dangerous place to go, even in jest.

Ooh, I don't really know...

The  funny thing is I was thinking of that character when I used the name in my original post  ;D

That's what I meant but I didn't put it very well.

Given the mantra that good news is no news, almost all railwy coverage by the media is bad news - disruption, strikes, overcrowding etc. The vast majority of those send a reporter out to interview Joe Public. And most of the comments broadcast are negative

It all adds to the drip drip drip of this stuff fed to the public, and I suspect a large number simply lap it up.

This is added to by idiot comedians like Hugh Dennis who seem to work a stupid "joke" about Southern into many of his routines. Perhaps he's unaware that comedians were telling "jokes" about stale railway sandwiches in the 1930s and they weren't funny either...