Make no mistake, the great train fare robbery is under way

[whole diary]

[ChrisB]

From the i paper

The Department for Transport is plotting to abolish reasonably-priced walk-on tickets for millions of long-distance rail journeys

It’s been a bad week for public transport. The Government that promised to “ensure… affordable transport” is raising bus fares by 50 per cent, rail fares by 4.6 per cent and rail cards by 16 per cent – while increasing petrol duty by… 0 per cent.

You had to look pretty hard to find the rail fare rises – they were interred on page 97 of a government document – but at least that’s all the nasty surprises, right?

I’m afraid not. An even greater unexploded fare bomb awaits. The Department for Transport (DfT^» (Department for Transport - about)) is plotting to abolish reasonably priced walk-on tickets for millions of long-distance rail journeys.

At the moment, for almost any off-peak journey, you can turn up at the station and buy an “off-peak” or “super off-peak” ticket that lets you hop on the next train, or any other off-peak train that day. They can’t sell out, and you can return by any off-peak train you like. It’s dearer than an advance fare, but much, much less than the top-whack peak flexi ticket.

Like thousands of others, I buy off-peak tickets online because I know the day I want to travel, but not how long my meeting is going to last, so I don’t want to lash myself to a particular train.

But now, as part of its long campaign to make trains more like everything we hate about air travel (tiny windows, aircraft seats), the DfT wants to move to full airline-style pricing – where you must either commit to a particular time, or pay a small fortune.

They’ve already started on LNER^» (London North Eastern Railway - about) (the main nationalised long-distance operator – an early warning that nationalisation may not be the promised nirvana). In February, flexible off-peak tickets from London to Newcastle, Berwick and Edinburgh were abolished.

Now you must buy either a full peak fare, or an advance ticket tying you to one train, or an “Advance 70 Flex” ticket, whose contradiction-in-terms syntax tells us all we need to know. On the “Advance 70 Flex”, you’re tied to the specific train you book, or another LNER train 70 minutes either side. There are limited supplies, no refunds, and no stopovers.

Most importantly, as well as being less flexible, it is far more expensive. The old super off-peak walk-on single from London to Edinburgh was £91.20 (say £95.70 now, with the March 2024 fare rise). At the time of writing, 4pm on Thursday, the cheapest “Advance 70 Flex” for the noon train on Friday is £138.40 – 45 per cent more.

They’ve used it to jack up the prices for the fully-advance, no-flex tickets too. Even one of those – £118.40 for that same midday train – is 30 per cent more than the flexible off-peak ticket used to be. At the time of writing, there are only three of each ticket left, so anyone else wanting that train must buy the full peak single – £199.60, more than double the old off-peak price.

As Mark Smith, the “Man in Seat 61” train guru, says: “It’s becoming clear that this means higher prices and vastly reduced flexibility.”

The group Railfuture found the same as I have, with effective increases of up to 130 per cent. But last month the scheme was extended to more stations on and off the LNER route, and soon it is likely to be rolled out on many more, perhaps all, long-distance journeys.

How do I know? Because when I was transport adviser to the Prime Minister in No 10, I fought off DfT officials who wanted to do it. We also ensured that the 2021 rail white paper said that “affordable turn up and go fares… will continue to be protected”. After I stopped doing the transport job, they sneaked through the LNER “pilot”.

Now, there’s a new government that has already fallen for at least one pet project – restricting the winter fuel allowance – which civil servants try to get past every set of wide-eyed new ministers.

It’s also true, I concede, that the railway needs money. Those Aslef pay rises won’t fund themselves. So expect yet another absurd complication to already complex rail fares. Prepare yourself for another squeeze that drives people away from clean, safe, expensive trains and back into dirty, dangerous, cheap cars.

Andrew Gilligan is head of transport at Policy Exchange

Ok, it's Gilligan - but he does definitely have contacts in the right places

[grahame]

From the i paper

The Department for Transport is plotting to abolish reasonably-priced walk-on tickets for millions of long-distance rail journeys

It’s been a bad week for public transport. The Government that promised to “ensure… affordable transport” is raising bus fares by 50 per cent, rail fares by 4.6 per cent and rail cards by 16 per cent – while increasing petrol duty by… 0 per cent.

You had to look pretty hard to find the rail fare rises – they were interred on page 97 of a government document – but at least that’s all the nasty surprises, right?

I’m afraid not. An even greater unexploded fare bomb awaits. The Department for Transport (DfT^» (Department for Transport - about)) is plotting to abolish reasonably priced walk-on tickets for millions of long-distance rail journeys.

[snip]

Ok, it's Gilligan - but he does definitely have contacts in the right places

It's perhaps logical if you're going to "simplify the system" and "reduce needed subsidy" to cut out the lower prices ticket options, provided that you don't reduce passenger numbers so dramatically that you take less money.   It doesn't matter if you loose some customers - indeed if they are lost of busy cheaper trains (such as on Saturdays and Sundays) that gives you more spaces / seats to fill with marketing while still running the same number of trains, or the opportunity to make the service more reliable at the weekend by cutting the number of trains in operation.

Let me repeat that ... this time highlighting some stated goals that can be achieved

It's perhaps logical if you're going to "simplify the system" and "reduce needed subsidy" to cut out the lower prices ticket options, provided that you don't reduce passenger numbers so dramatically that you take less money.   It doesn't matter if you loose some customers - indeed if they are lost of busy cheaper trains (such as on Saturdays and Sundays) that gives you more spaces / seats to fill with marketing while still running the same number of trains, or the opportunity to make the service more reliable at the weekend by cutting the number of trains in operation.

[Ralph Ayres]

Co-incidentally I'm just back from a couple of days on LNER^» (London North Eastern Railway - about), London-York with an overnight stay, then on to Shildon next day and back to London (spot the attractions visited!).  Plans pretty fluid as I didn't know when I'd start either morning or how long I'd spend in Shildon, but possibly the "70 minute flex" tickets would have worked for me, except they haven't added them for any of those journeys yet, despite removing return tickets allegedly as part of the same project.  Hard to tell if I paid more for my 3 single-leg tickets than before the change as I wouldn't have been able to stop overnight on the way out on an off-peak return London-Shildon (though thanks to the slightly arcane rules I could have done on the way back).

I suppose for a lot of people, plus or minus an hour or so will be all they need and the lack of just that little bit of flexibility is probably the source of many complaints, so I think it's going to be hard to build up a groundswell of objections to any changes from the wider public.  Flexible tickets are already out of reach price-wise for many people so they just aren't a consideration.