The price of train tickets!

[PopNotPolitics]

The cost of train tickets is rising AGAIN! We seem to get this every single year!

I earn okay, but I almost always take the coach when I travel between cities as I just can't justify the cost of the trains anymore as they are.

Surely they will just be unaffordable to most people soon, and what will happen then?

The thing is, trains are always packed, despite the prices. The rail infrastructure is not able to support the ridiculous overpopulation in this country. If trains were cheaper, then they would be even more packed. It would be like Mumbai with people hanging off the back of the carriage!

For a regular journey we make to see my family, standard rail tickets are £142 per person.

Advance tickets, which would send us round the houses with two extra changes, are £92 each.

Driving, we use at most £40 in petrol for the round trip, that's for two of us with car fully laden with luggage.

Even assuming the trains ran smoothly, which they hardly ever do, from the cost perspective it is a no-brainer.

Coach tickets are from £18 - £23 per person, but the downside of that is that it's 10 hours each way on the coach, compared to (traffic willing) 4 hours in the car and (trains running smoothly) 5 hours on the train. 20 hours is a lot of time to 'write off' if you only have a week off work!

This is a consequence of two key things.

A few years ago Chris Graying decided train passengers should bear much more of the cost of running the railways rather than tax payers. This was based on the thinking at the time that the heaviest users (and therefore benficiaries) of trains were commuters from mostly well off professionals from London suburbs and SE England home counties. Obviously covid and subsequent growth of WFH in the same well off professions has blown a hole in that assumption.

Furthermore covid restrictions pretty much bankrupted public transport so fares have had to go up to address the huge black hole.

I looked at a last minute trip to London after NY. Best part of a £1,000 for both of us 1st class, return.

We will travel by car, to somewhere more local.

I’d much prefer a standard fare, easy. It costs this much, any day, to get a train., no matter when it is booked. It costs more to go to somewhere further and less if it is closer. Easy.

I think that sums it up. The Tories ruin everything and we just keep voting for them. I honestly don't understand it.

It costs me €9 for a 2hr train to nearest airport here.

We fly to uk. Then it cost me £110 to take a 2hr train from uk airport to my parents. A single journey costs more than my return flight often.

We often train to airport here, fly, then usually hire car in uk as even the extortionate car hire is cheaper than trains for 3 of us.

Unless you can get a cheap deal, e.g. Seatfrog, First Class tickets are obscenely priced. Of course, you can bet the policy makers travel First Class and, relaxing in their oasis of privilege, have no idea what the trains are really like.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Would he not be able to get a refund?

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...

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

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.

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?

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.

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.

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

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.

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