Train ticket prices

[Chippy_boy]

Honestly they have long since been a complete joke, haven't they.

I used to do the Bristol to London Paddington run quite regularly, having moved to Bristol in 1982 and needing to go to London quite often. For 36 years now, I've seen the prices go up and up and up, and usually with price increased greater than RPI.

I wrote to my MP about it some 3 or 4 years ago and was told that we'd had "a decade plus of above RPI increases, to pay for new investment". So now perhaps 14 years of RPI+ increases. To the extent that a normal 2nd class return from Bristol Parkway to London Paddington - a journey of only about 100 miles - is now £211.40

How UTTERLY bonkers is that? It's gone beyond "expensive" and is now firmly in the realms of UTTERLY ridiculous. And after all these years of "investment", it's the same shitty rolling stock since I started doing the journey 36 years ago. All they have done is refurbished the seats.

I may be about to start a new job, which very generously will pay for 1st class rail travel. A first class return is £311 !!! So today I checked how much it would cost for a 1 year 1st class season ticket for this journey.

Are you sitting down?

£24,388. Yes, TWENTY FOUR THOUSAND POUNDS for a fucking train ticket.

I am the most right wing person I know and do not advocate nationalising anything since imo everything government touches, turns to shite. But nevertheless, SOMETHING has to be done, because this is just completely and utterly ridiculous.

 

[PannickAtTheDisco]

Virgin tried to charge me £125 to upgrade my off-peak ticket to peak at 3:20pm on a Monday, because apparently half-full trains between 3:20 to 6:40 is both "peak" and better business than offering a £50 upgrade that I probably would have stumped up.

Just nonsense.

 

[Chippy_boy]

Virgin tried to charge me £125 to upgrade my off-peak ticket to peak at 3:20pm on a Monday, because apparently half-full trains between 3:20 to 6:40 is both "peak" and better business than offering a £50 upgrade that I probably would have stumped up.

Just nonsense.

It's just crazy mate, isn't it.

For me, I want the government to do the absolute bare minimum in this country, because imo they are all useless cunts. But the bare minimum is to provide a decent education for our kids, decent hospitals and health care for when you are ill, and decent infrastructure to allow the country to function efficiently and business to thrive.

I'd score us about 1 out of 10 across those domains. It's pretty depressing when places like Lithuania has better infrastructure than we do.

 

[lust overlord]

Aaaand they'll keep charging ridiculous prices because they can.
The road network,long neglected,is a disgrace.
Forces people,on to the scandalously neglected expensive rail network.
Rinse and repeat.
Successive governments(mostly tories) since the 1970s and 80s have took the piss.
Similar problems will occur with the utility firms,they are already,rising prices shittier services.
Shareholders want their dividends.

Privatise everything until nothing left to sell.

Reap what we sow.

 

[Chippy_boy]

Aaaand they'll keep charging ridiculous prices because they can.
The road network,long neglected,is a disgrace.
Forces people,on to the scandalously neglected expensive rail network.
Rinse and repeat.
Successive governments(mostly tories) since the 1970s and 80s have took the piss.
Similar problems will occur with the utility firms,they are already,rising prices shittier services.
Shareholders want their dividends.

Privatise everything until nothing left to sell.

Reap what we sow.

I don't agree that privatisation is the cause. Would you advocate privatising Sainsbury's or John Lewis as a result of their poor service and them being private? The cause is lack of proper competition because they fucked up how the rail privatisation was done.

If you could travel between Bristol and London on Virgin Trains and GWR and Cross Country, then you'd have the situation where passengers would think "Hmmmm, shall I take the 7:30 Virgin Train, which is £xyz but I get the great table-side service and excellent breakfast? Or perhaps the 7:45 GWR train, which is a bit cheaper and they have those excellent reclining seats?"

We'd have REAL competition and prices would have come down and down and down, just like Easyjet and Ryanair have driven airfares down and made that affordable.

Instead we have a 10 year monopoly on every route, a private company profiteering (since that's what they will do if allowed) and a fucking useless regulator which refuses to do their job and TELL the rail company to reduce its prices.

I remember when a flight from London to Paris was £500 return back in the late 1990's. It's now perhaps 1/10th of that if you shop around. This could have happened to train fares too, had we not fucked it up. Can you imagine if we only allowed 1 airline to fly from London to Paris, and we let them charge what they like? The price would be probably £1,000 return or more by now. That's what we've done to the railways.

 

[purplenose]

It is somewhat ridiculous that I can get a flight from Liverpool to Sofia for less than it will cost me to catch the train from here in Nantwich to the airport in the first place. Robbing bastards.

 

[lust overlord]

Advocating privatisation of Sainsbury?
Must be a typo.

Trouble is there is only so much rail track available,so limited amount of competing train companies can actually use the tracks.

There's a lot more room in the sky,hence greater competition.

Seeing as we removed thousands of miles of rail track decades ago, due to underuse I don't see any improvement in the situation any time soon.

 

[yerwot?]

Saying they fucked up is the opposite of reality. Just ask the shareholders and the fatcat boardroom parasites. Unregulated capitalism in ripoff shocker

 

[lust overlord]

Saying they fucked up is the opposite of reality. Just ask the shareholders and the fatcat boardroom parasites. Unregulated capitalism in ripoff shocker

Nah mate it's nothing to do with privatisation.
;)
More people use the trains now than ever before.Yet peak prices continue to rise.
Ironically many of the parent companies of train providers in the UK are state owned foreign providers.

 

[Man_City_Loyal]

I don't agree that privatisation is the cause. Would you advocate privatising Sainsbury's or John Lewis as a result of their poor service and them being private? The cause is lack of proper competition because they fucked up how the rail privatisation was done.

If you could travel between Bristol and London on Virgin Trains and GWR and Cross Country, then you'd have the situation where passengers would think "Hmmmm, shall I take the 7:30 Virgin Train, which is £xyz but I get the great table-side service and excellent breakfast? Or perhaps the 7:45 GWR train, which is a bit cheaper and they have those excellent reclining seats?"

We'd have REAL competition and prices would have come down and down and down, just like Easyjet and Ryanair have driven airfares down and made that affordable.

Instead we have a 10 year monopoly on every route, a private company profiteering (since that's what they will do if allowed) and a fucking useless regulator which refuses to do their job and TELL the rail company to reduce its prices.

I remember when a flight from London to Paris was £500 return back in the late 1990's. It's now perhaps 1/10th of that if you shop around. This could have happened to train fares too, had we not fucked it up. Can you imagine if we only allowed 1 airline to fly from London to Paris, and we let them charge what they like? The price would be probably £1,000 return or more by now. That's what we've done to the railways.

Spot on. well said.