The price of train tickets!

This is why driving is the best option is almost all cases, for car owners. No justification for paying for crap, overpriced train services

I have to travel to England regularly (from Scotland) and always fly.

Door to door timings - trains and planes are roughly equal but on price - flying is so much cheaper I can't justify a train journey.

It's ridiculous

We pay nearly £900 for a season ticket so DS can travel half an hour to college. In the four weeks before the Christmas break nearly half of his trains were cancelled which often meant someone had to fetch him. We have applied for delay repay and have been given around £4 back for each journey. It's ridiculous.

National express need to have more journeys and more locations available not easy getting where you want to go with them at all.

Don't think my 200k 13 year old car is going to depreciate much with 310 mile round trip to Wales.
Besides I bought the cad to drive not to sell

Oh, the joys of privatisation. Particularly with no oversight. The government needs the private companies to keep making profits, so that they can keep paying in to party coffers, so they're allowed to make above inflation rises every year. Obviously they're also in hock to the fossil fuel industry as well, so they don't actually want people to stop using their cars; that might harm their donations.

And as for the muppet up thread saying that public owned transport would be awful, maybe take a look at how it seems to work better on the continent.

I've just priced Scotland to Wales for a wedding in June, it was coming up as cheapest £645 for family for 4, and take 7hours. It'll be £200 to fly to Birmingham from Edinburgh and then hire a car for a few days will be £90, also will take less than 4hrs.

Driving would be even cheaper at around £100 for fuel and having the convenience of our own car.

For environmental reasons I don't want to fly but I just can't justify the train at double the price. This is also booking months in advance, not last minute.

Similar to me; £46 from where I live (45 mins on the train) into Waterloo. That includes the underground which I need to use to get to my various offices. I only travel in 3 times a week so it’s pretty much same price as if I bought the discounted weekly/monthly ticket

it’s then £8.50 per day for the station car park,

absolutely crazy

as although some may qualify for a Disabled Person's Railcard, not all do

You need a PIP mobility award to qualify, and we all know how difficult it is to get a PIP award.

That's true, but it's important to be aware of the full costs as well as just the fuel.

I've just looked up a similar route for the circumstances we might have to go - a relative in hospital (DP's father, for example).

If we knew a fortnight in advance that he would have a stroke and that he wouldn't need care/visiting for more than a month (whether due to recovery or otherwise) - £682. The price is no different if we had to leave in ten minutes.

There's also the issue that the vaguely cheaper ones involve multiple changes, which affects those who have mobility issues, as although some may qualify for a Disabled Person's Railcard, not all do and booking assistance for three changes (assuming that it's even possible to access the stations, which isn't the case in far too many stations, including our nearest and from experience, also using the tube and at Paddington, depending upon which service/escalator and lift failures/platform it drops you in at) gives at least opportunities for the assistance to fail to materialise. So it inherently discriminates against disabled passengers, older passengers, those with buggies for small children as well.

That's only relevant if you're making a choice of buying a car OR using public transport. What people are talking about here are where they already have a car, so all the fixed costs remain fixed and the only costs to consider when deciding whether to drive or use the train for a particular journey are the variable costs, i.e. fuel, tolls, parking, etc.

The trains would be far worse without privatisation. It was another "PFI" situation because all the rolling stock was old and non compliant with H&S, disability access, etc., and the only way to pay for the billions of pounds of new trains needed was using private funding rather than government debt. Modern compliant trains cost multi million pounds per coach.

It goes back further than Grayling (idiot that he is). George Osborne had fares rising at RPI+3 at one point. Remember the protests against the fuel duty escalator?

That's the thing. The reason that Manchester to London peak fares are at an eyewatering £369.40 is that otherwise the trains would be so packed that they couldn't safely run (Pendolinos have weight restrictions because of the tilt system). If we had more capacity this wouldn't be an issue and fares could drop to sensible levels. Unfortunately the government has recently curtailed a project which would have boosted capacity between Manchester and London.

Have you accounted for depreciation? That's the second biggest cost after fuel.

According to this site, the average car does 7,600 miles per year and costs £3,556. That works out at 47p/mile.
https://www.nimblefins.co.uk/cheap-car-insurance/average-cost-run-car-uk

I think it's a joke- the government bang on about using public transport as it's better for the environment but rail travel is so much more expensive. We have been up and down to Scotland quite a few times in the last year. Way way cheaper to fly than go by train from the East. What with the cost AND all the strikes it was a bit of a no brainer.

Local bus service is pretty good but then again that's only £2 per trip so good value for money. Trains- no thanks...

Would he not be able to get a refund?

I’ve got the coach to Canterbury/Folkestone before especially if I don’t fancy driving. People at my work get trains but paid for by department and more flexible re times and dates.

The main advantage of it is that, if your train is cancelled and you have to get the next one, you can still get a seat while the rest of the train is in pandemonium.

Train Pal app is good! Bought a 2 together rail card for a discounted price on there then got my adult kids to sign up to the app. With the card, split tickets and discount, I saved £100 on a ticket for my son and me.

Honestly, I went first class a few times - occasionally when you book(ed?) in advance, you could get a first class ticket for the same as the Advance - and it didn't make much difference. You get a single seat with nobody next to you (but possibly on the other side of the table) and a little table space. I can get the same sometimes in the Quiet carriage, if it's not a busy train (West Coast London-Scotland). You could get a free drink, but they might only start doing that half-way into the journey or do it only once, so it's one free coffee or one free glass of wine, hardly luxurious.

You know what first class looks nice? The one you only see in films set a good number of decades ago.

I went to Devon at Christmas (from London) tickets booked a couple of weeks in advance, just under £40, which seemed reasonable, especially as Christmas Eve and 27th.

It’s ridiculous. I live in commutersville and my train to the London terminus is £55 a day, plus tube fares to my office. There aren’t coaches from where I live at an appropriate time for commuting and I work in the City so driving is a nightmare and there’s nowhere to park. So I basically have no other choice unless I move house (ie spend more on housing to make travelling cheaper, which I can’t afford to do) or change industry. Since the government knows I won’t do either of those they have no incentive to improve things for me.

Rishi flies. Almost a private airport with an RAF base less than 10 miles from his mansion. He's in and out frequently.