Trains - you just wouldn't

Leeds to Birmingham

Standard return - £132
1st Return - £306

So that would be 600 sovs for two folk getting to Brum for the day!
It's good to know that UK Gov are not even *slightly* serious about
taking cars off the road.

 

Peak time fares are just ridiculous. I was looking at fares to Liverpool
a few weeks ago and it was 206 quid standard return. Off-peak it was
more like 30 quid but I'd have missed the ferry.

 

It's a punishment for being in Leeds in the first place and wanting to
go to Birmingham.

Seriously, I had much the same experience when wanting to travel from
Lunnon to Edinburgh and back a few years back. PikeyJet were about a
quarter of the best rail fare that I could get - the PikeyJet seats
weren't particularly cheap as it was a lateish booking.

 

I just checked Brum to MK direct around 18:30 (to get to Flitwick).
£5.50. Paul Corfield might/not disagree but what a *very* fucked up
system.

 

I had cause to go to Manchester a few months ago, travelling from
Canterbury.

Booked a few days in advance and got pikey class one way tickets for me
and my son for a grand total of a shade over £24, with the London to
Manchester leg on one of Richard Branstons super duper specials - think
it took less time to cover that part of the journey than it did to get
from here into London.

http://www.thetrainline.com

Think the main thing in order to get cheapo tickets, is you need to
book at least 72 hours in advance.

HTH

 

The clincher is travelling before 9.30am. Certain tickets aren't valid
at some other times, but 9.30am is the important bit.

 

Not IME. I think it's a little more complicated that that or it used
to be anyway. When I had my grief, I had two weeks notice before
traveling. I even went through a tame travel agent who I know when I
was getting nowhere with no luck.

 

£32 each way first class at http://www.virgintrains.co.uk,
at certain times, if you book in advance.

 

That's how it worked for me in the above scenario - I used the above
website.

Having just looked at the part that's 'print@home', I can book fares to
get me from London to Birmingham with Virgin Trains, and as soon as
tomorrow, for £7 each way.

 

Down here, if you're travelling into London at least, you can get a one
day travelcard at the reduced rate, so long as you're not going to
alight in London before 10am.

 

<snip>

Another example .. just booked return tickets to the NEC from Wrexham for my
daughter and I. £20.70 all in .... not worth the hassle of using the bike or
the car, assuming they don't royally **** up like they did a couple of years
back!

 

Blame both the Tories and the Labour Party then. The "walk on" fares
you are referring are not regulated and have been massively increased by
the train companies. Their argument is that such huge fares are
compensated for by their range of advance purchase tickets which are
ludicrously cheap (in some cases).

The whole ethos with such tickets is to grab money from the customer as
early as possible and then hamstring with journey restrictions as to
dates of travel and train times. You also cannot travel on another
operator's train even where they share the same tracks between two
places. That's fine if your life is such that you can plan everything
weeks in advance. The one big advantage of trains is their "turn up and
go" nature and interavailability - our wonderful railway system is no
longer a railway but some dreadful abortion of a budget airline. What
was once the basic right of everyone travelling by train is now being
priced into oblivion. No wonder the complexity of fares is one of the
biggest sources of complaint and biggest deterrents to rail travel.

I get 75% off the ordinary walk on fares but prices are now so high that
I cannot afford to travel even at that level of discount. I'm also not
prepared to book weeks and weeks in advance if I fancy a day out
somewhere. The answer is - like you - that I opt not to go to by train
or simply not to travel.

As the DfT rail section knows nothing about trains - as evidenced by
their palpable lack of vision and repeated kowtowing to the Treasury -
then don't expect any action soon to deal with your basic complaint.

 

That's the response I kinda expected. How truly depressing.
Thank goodness we are minded to travel by bike.

Is it now irreparable?

 

I think we are headed for interesting times.

Scotland has a devolved railway and they are spending millions on it.

Ireland is spending a fortune on its rail network and depending on how
devolution in Northern Ireland goes it might also see some independence
in transport matters. There might be a parallel there. The Welsh have
gained some more freedom and might do interesting things as they have a
national franchise.

This then leaves dear old England with a rail system threatened with
massive cutbacks by dear old Gordon Brown. The most recent railways act
has given DfT civil servants new powers to shut lines with almost no
consultation or right of appeal. They have deftly passed the task of
balancing funds against "network outputs" to the Rail Regulator. However
the buck now stops at the door of the DfT (thus government) overall -
quite a change from the former SRA which was at arms length.

Now the DfT has recently found to its cost that fiddling with train
timetables can be a nasty business if the passengers become revolting.
This is what happened with the refranchising of Great Western where huge
cuts were threatened to branch lines in Devon and Cornwall. A massive
campaign by passengers and their local representatives and some deft
buck passing by First Group (who won the franchise) has forced the
reversal of all of the DfT inspired cuts. While the civil servants
will have learnt their lesson and will be far more sneaky in future it
is quite clear that we are in for a repeat with Cross Country, East
Midlands and West Midlands franchises. The delightful additional irony
is the number of marginal constituencies served by those franchises - it
will be interesting to see what happens.

When people in England wake up to what is happening elsewhere in the UK
and Ireland and get twitchy about the cost and even existence of their
train service life could get very difficult for any government but more
immediately Labour.

Unfortunately the railways require stability in order to plan and to get
that you need political consensus - I cannot see that happening with
Brown and Cameron at each others throats and I am suspicious as to the
extent of genuine concern about environmental matters from any party bar
the Greens.

 

I see the truth in everything you say but forget the Greens. Their
agenda is a Luddite one, they want to take away personal mobility (1)
and put us back in the early 1900's.

Excepting the better off middle classes i.e. them

 

That probably explains why last Sunday I went to get the train from
Glasgow to Edinburgh to find there weren't any because they were working
on the track.

I decided to get the bus from the *bus* station instead. What a novelty
that was.

I never fail to be amazed that you can't just step out the door and
expect to travel by public transport in a timely and efficient manner.

<fx: opens up ouija board to plan next journey by public transport >

 

When I traveled from London to Leeds a few years ago, divers were
inspecting the tracks.

You should be thankful for what you have. It's absolute shite here. On
the local rail system it takes two hours to get from my place to south
San Jose. I can make the trip in 15 minutes on my bike.

On the 'high-speed' train a trip from my place to San Francisco takes 1
hour 20 minutes. On the bike it takes me 40 minutes and this is in heavy
traffic filtering a good part of the way.

 

Well yes but you don't have real passenger railways in the States - with
the possible exception of the North East Corridor. I admit you do
freight trains very well but most American tourists cannot fathom that
we have such frequent services on the tube and main line trains.

 

To be fair I always check about travel at the weekend - especially on
Sundays. I agree it's a pain but it's not exactly a surprise that major
engineering work is done on the railways at weekends.

You also have a pretty decent express bus network in Scotland with
Citylink and the Stagecoach Express services.

 

This was unexpected. I don't normally travel by public transport but
since I'd been contemplating becoming a one car household I'd dropped
the Merc at a conveniently inconvenient point to see if I could hack it.

Judging by the rain outside tonight my resolve might fail.

Can't argue with £4 between Glasgow and Edinburgh.

Wouldn't have liked to have been the guy stuck at the midway point to be
told the bus was full. Harthill can be a cold and dark place at the best
of times. Half hour wait for the next bus which probably would have been
full as well would be a bit hard to take.