The six biggest train rip-offs!
Lovemoney
By Rachel Wait
I really hate paying for train fares. They always seem unnecessarily expensive. In fact, I am off to Liverpool in a couple of weeks and the amount I am having to fork out for my two-hour journey is simply outrageous!
However, the actual price of a train ticket is just one of the many ways train travel can rip you off. Here, I’m going to highlight some of the biggest ones.
Online booking fees
Taking the number one slot is online booking fees. These days it’s so easy to book your train ticket online. But whatever you do, don’t get caught out by booking fees!
The Trainline, for example, is probably one of the most well-known websites for booking train tickets. However, it has the audacity to charge a £1 booking fee for the service. It might not sound like much, but why pay it when plenty of other websites offer the same service absolutely free? And the charges don’t end there. If you pay by credit card on The Trainline, you’ll be charged a further £3.50 (per transaction). Outrageous! So make sure you boycott The Trainline and book elsewhere. After all, there are plenty of other options.
For a start, you could look at the East Coast website which allows you to buy tickets to all destinations in the UK without charging a booking fee. It also sometimes gives extra discounts. Alternatively, you could simply book through whichever rail company you’ll be travelling with as these generally won’t charge you a fee either.
First class
Travelling first class is a luxury only a few of us can afford. However, if you are planning to travel first class: watch out! Earlier this year, rail companies were accused of selling first-class tickets for services with no first-class coaches.
According to researchers at Which?, Southeastern rail services were offering first-class tickets on the high-speed route from London to Dover Priory and charging 30% more than a standard ticket. However, there was in fact no first-class seating!
First Capital Connect (FCC) was also found to be charging 63% more for single first-class fares between Luton Airport Parkway station and Wimbledon in South-West London. This direct line has no first-class service, but has declassified first-class carriages where standard ticket-holders can sit.
So you might want to think about whether travelling in first class is really worth it! This isn’t the only thing that bugs me about first class, however. I also get frustrated when I have to stand in an incredibly packed carriage on my commute to work, while the first-class carriage next door is completely empty. Why can’t all carriages be available to everyone on commuter routes at peak times? Let’s get rid of this first-class nonsense!
Ticket machines
If you’re buying your ticket in advance and want to avoid the horrendous queues for the ticket office so often seen at stations, be wary of ticket machines. In some cases, passengers are unable to use these machines to buy off-peak tickets in advance. As a result, they either have to buy a peak ticket at a higher price, or wait until the peak period has finished – which is hardly convenient and could result in a rushed buy and missing the train.
What’s more, if you’re trying to use a discount card to buy tickets in advance, you may also find you can’t on ticket machines. For example, quite recently, I discovered I couldn’t use the ticket machine to buy a ticket in advance with my Gold Card discount. So I ended up waiting until I was just about to board my train to get the ticket I wanted.
So if you are planning to buy your tickets in advance, you may be better off facing the queue at the ticket office to ensure you’re getting the best price.
Peak times
Continuing with this theme, peak times themselves are a bit of a rip-off. We all know that travelling during peak time costs considerably more than travelling off-peak. However, according to research by Which?, some train companies are now charging peak rates well outside busy travel times.
For example, some operators, such as East Coast Trains and Virgin Trains, begin evening peak services mid-afternoon (3pm). For East Coast Trains, this means the evening peak time lasts for four hours. In comparison, other operators, such as Chiltern and Merseyrail, don’t have an evening peak time at all.
What’s more, East Coast trains have different morning peak times depending on which ticket you have. So generally speaking, the morning peak time ends at 10.05. However, if you’re travelling first class, it ends at 07.59, if you have an off-peak day return or travelcard, it ends at 09.54, and if you have a super off-peak card, it ends at 11.17! Meanwhile, other train operators, such as Merseyrail, end their peak morning period at 09.30. Confused? Yes, so am I.
So if you are travelling by train, make sure you check peak times carefully on the route you’re travelling (and which ticket you have) so you don’t end up paying more than you really need to. It's a hassle but it's far better than getting caught out and being forced to pay full price because you're travelling with an off-peak ticket at a peak time.
Splitting tickets
I find it a tad irritating that splitting a ticket can sometimes cost significantly less than buying one direct train ticket. If I want to get the best deal on my ticket, do I really have to spend ages trying to figure out how many times I can split my ticket to save money? (Generally, the more you split, the more you save.)
For example, if I was travelling from Birmingham to Basingstoke, I’d have to fork out £56.40 (travelling off-peak and one way). But by splitting my ticket at Banbury, I’d save £30.50. That’s because a single ticket from Birmingham to Banbury costs £13.90, while a ticket from Banbury to Basingstoke costs £13 - so in total, I’d be paying £26.90.
This is a great saving and it may be worth the effort of trying to figure it out. But I still think it's a bit of a rip-off that I have to pay £30 more to simply get one direct ticket when I am travelling on exactly the same route I'd be travelling on if I split my ticket.
Single costs the same (or nearly)
Similarly, why do most single tickets cost nearly the same as a return? If, for whatever reason, I only require a single ticket, why do I have to pay almost the same as someone who is effectively doing that journey twice? It’s unfair and a waste of my money!
For example, if I were to travel from London Waterloo East to Ashford on a Saturday, it would cost me £22.20 for a single ticket. Yet if I wanted to travel back to Waterloo the same day, I would only have to pay 10p more! And if I returned a week later, I would pay £25.40 – so just £3.20 more. Ridiculous!
UK rail rip-offs
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John Ashworth
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Steve Appleton
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Re: UK rail rip-offs
One other problem in the UK is that even if you start your journey, a longer one which incorporates a train change, with the first train company during off-peak time, the next train company will not recognise or accept that this is a single-journey connection and will want to levy a peak travel surcharge.
I nearly had that happen when travelling from Brighton to Stoke via Euston. I left Brighton in the early afternoon, during off-peak. I crossed London by cab (so there was minimal delay) and when I boarded a Virgin train at Euston, the conductor told me that this was peak train and that my off-peak ticket would be surcharged by a massive amount (almost as much as a full peak fare). Unless I won the lottery that instant, I had no choice but to get off and wait three hours into the evening for the next off-peak train! If the train had pulled out before the conductor had arrived, I would probably have been left no option but to reach for the credit card and pay up!
Despite my protests, the Virgin staff at the enquiries desk were not interested nor even cared.
I nearly had that happen when travelling from Brighton to Stoke via Euston. I left Brighton in the early afternoon, during off-peak. I crossed London by cab (so there was minimal delay) and when I boarded a Virgin train at Euston, the conductor told me that this was peak train and that my off-peak ticket would be surcharged by a massive amount (almost as much as a full peak fare). Unless I won the lottery that instant, I had no choice but to get off and wait three hours into the evening for the next off-peak train! If the train had pulled out before the conductor had arrived, I would probably have been left no option but to reach for the credit card and pay up!
Despite my protests, the Virgin staff at the enquiries desk were not interested nor even cared.
"To train or not to train, that is the question"
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John Ashworth
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Re: UK rail rip-offs
Capitalism in action! The chaotic state of fares and tickets in UK is one of the downsides of rail privatisation.
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Steve Appleton
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Re: UK rail rip-offs
The problem is not capitalism as such. There plenty of examples where capitalism has not produced pricing chaos and confusion. Usually where governments and bureaucrats never interfered and never over-regulated.
The problems are:
1. in the physical nature and structure of railways themselves, and,
2. in the way that the railway concessions were originally structured.
First, structurally railways cannot encourage true competition. Unlike airlines, although theoretically possible, it is difficult to offer directly and openly competing, but almost identical, services over a single railway track route. The result is that true open competition, one of the founding tenets of capitalism, does not exist. This lack of direct competition over most routes allows each operator to structure its fares in whatever way it wants to attract customers when it perceives demand to be either low or discourage (milk) customers when demand is high. Each operator can choose its own logic to do so without any need to reference any logically competing price structures.
Second, (and I say this without consulting reference material) it was decided that concessions would be granted individually to operators over fairly arbitrary routes. Apart from the major main-lines, super-concessions over larger and diverse parts of the network were seen as anti-competitive, so were not granted. The breakup and concessioning was ultimately designed by bureaucrats in a fairly arbitrary way. This meant that the number of concessions granted was large. For the most part, each operator only "sees" a small part of the network. This fragmentation means that individual operators do not structure fares on the basis of a reasonable portion of the whole. Because of the large number of operators, there is also little or no ability to cross-subsidise routes to achieve a levelling of costs and fares as there was under BR.
Another consequence is that subsidisation is also then becomes difficult to manage. Who gets subsidies and how much? Naturally small operators on small rural routes would have higher costs per passenger-mile, for instance than say, the East Coast Mainline or the London commuter belt. But, giving higher subsidies to some operators and not to others would be seen as inherently unfair, bringing forth protests.
All of this would never have been a problem for a single national rail network like BR. They got a big subsidy and would have used it wherever and however necessary to even out the fares across the network and between peak to non-peak times without having to worry about fairness. I suspect that DB and SNCF still operate like that today, hence their simple and apprently even and affordable fare structures.
So, John. It's not about capitalism, but about politcians and bureaucrats. Don't blame capitalism, blame the government of the time and their successors who have done precious little to rectify the mistakes. It's about the decision to break up a once-functional and affordable single railway network; even if the on-time performance was lousy, the track was rough, the trains were old and the sandwiches were even older.
The problems are:
1. in the physical nature and structure of railways themselves, and,
2. in the way that the railway concessions were originally structured.
First, structurally railways cannot encourage true competition. Unlike airlines, although theoretically possible, it is difficult to offer directly and openly competing, but almost identical, services over a single railway track route. The result is that true open competition, one of the founding tenets of capitalism, does not exist. This lack of direct competition over most routes allows each operator to structure its fares in whatever way it wants to attract customers when it perceives demand to be either low or discourage (milk) customers when demand is high. Each operator can choose its own logic to do so without any need to reference any logically competing price structures.
Second, (and I say this without consulting reference material) it was decided that concessions would be granted individually to operators over fairly arbitrary routes. Apart from the major main-lines, super-concessions over larger and diverse parts of the network were seen as anti-competitive, so were not granted. The breakup and concessioning was ultimately designed by bureaucrats in a fairly arbitrary way. This meant that the number of concessions granted was large. For the most part, each operator only "sees" a small part of the network. This fragmentation means that individual operators do not structure fares on the basis of a reasonable portion of the whole. Because of the large number of operators, there is also little or no ability to cross-subsidise routes to achieve a levelling of costs and fares as there was under BR.
Another consequence is that subsidisation is also then becomes difficult to manage. Who gets subsidies and how much? Naturally small operators on small rural routes would have higher costs per passenger-mile, for instance than say, the East Coast Mainline or the London commuter belt. But, giving higher subsidies to some operators and not to others would be seen as inherently unfair, bringing forth protests.
All of this would never have been a problem for a single national rail network like BR. They got a big subsidy and would have used it wherever and however necessary to even out the fares across the network and between peak to non-peak times without having to worry about fairness. I suspect that DB and SNCF still operate like that today, hence their simple and apprently even and affordable fare structures.
So, John. It's not about capitalism, but about politcians and bureaucrats. Don't blame capitalism, blame the government of the time and their successors who have done precious little to rectify the mistakes. It's about the decision to break up a once-functional and affordable single railway network; even if the on-time performance was lousy, the track was rough, the trains were old and the sandwiches were even older.
"To train or not to train, that is the question"
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John Ashworth
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Re: UK rail rip-offs
The capitalism comment was tongue in cheek (although I may have been humming the red flag whilst writing), and this probably isn't the place to leap into a spirited defence of socialism (no politics on the FOTR forum!), but thanks for the long analysis, Steve.
Without going in depth into what you say, I would sum the British railway privatisation experience up by saying the problem was the way it was privatised rather than privatisation per se. There are many good things about the new privatised railways in Britain - one of the newest train fleets in the world, catching up on infrastructure maintenance and renewal which had been neglected for decades, a huge increase in passenger numbers and a smaller increase in freight tonnages, finally getting a proper asset register, and much more. But the problem (with ticketing and various other issues) seems to be the fragmentation into too many small companies, each in its own little world, without enough coherence. I think that is one of the main reasons why the ticketing structure is chaotic. BR had a much simpler ticketing structure because it was a coherent whole, not because it had a government subsidy.
British railways are still massively subsidised by the tax-payer, incidentally, as are most railways in the world. I'm all in favour of it, and would rather see more tax-payers' money going to railways and less to roads (and nuclear weapons - oops, politics again!).
Without going in depth into what you say, I would sum the British railway privatisation experience up by saying the problem was the way it was privatised rather than privatisation per se. There are many good things about the new privatised railways in Britain - one of the newest train fleets in the world, catching up on infrastructure maintenance and renewal which had been neglected for decades, a huge increase in passenger numbers and a smaller increase in freight tonnages, finally getting a proper asset register, and much more. But the problem (with ticketing and various other issues) seems to be the fragmentation into too many small companies, each in its own little world, without enough coherence. I think that is one of the main reasons why the ticketing structure is chaotic. BR had a much simpler ticketing structure because it was a coherent whole, not because it had a government subsidy.
British railways are still massively subsidised by the tax-payer, incidentally, as are most railways in the world. I'm all in favour of it, and would rather see more tax-payers' money going to railways and less to roads (and nuclear weapons - oops, politics again!).