The state of rail fares (or why I took the car to Nottingham instead)

As some of you know, I have interests outside travel writing and my day job. Sometimes I need to get off my backside and travel to another city to do those tasks.

As such, I needed to head to Nottingham for the day, to go behind the camera and shoot. My first move is normally to check the trains – mainly as I prefer to have a laptop open and look out of the window, rather than concentrate on anything in the world. It also gives me the chance to double-check images on the way back.

Alas, when I went to look online for a train ticket for a 45 mile single / 90-mile return journey, I was in for a nasty shock.
Running the route through the National Rail Enquiries fare engine gave this.
.

Firstly, I was in a bit of shock that only first-class tickets were on sale. Secondly, the price just made my jaw drop.

I did a check for a journey a few days later, which showed the more reasonable prices I was expecting:

What gives?

The little triangle gives away part of the issue – capacity – or lack of thereafter.

CrossCountry Trains (the operator who runs trains on this route is capping capacity and enforcing seat reservations.

For those like me who are on-walk up tickets on what is an Inter-Regional route, it makes short term travel planning… less than ideal, putting it mildly. It requires a level of precision or dread the thought – planning that I sometimes cannot account for (for example, I have shoots that run over, I may take my time getting to a station, or making a diversion for a drink).

Walk-up tickets are some of the most useful things on the rail network, that allow a passenger to get from A to B. However, train companies would much rather shift to the airline model of buy in advance.

That can offer savings, but if capacity is constrained – it causes problems for walk-up passengers… which are still a substantial amount of passengers.

So, the car then…

With that out of the way, and with me not even considering the coach for a ride, I chose to grab my Toyota Aygo for the trip. This would be a drive down the M6, up the M42, A42, onto the M1… and then peeling off onto a local road for a Park and Ride station at Toton Lane for the tram into Central Nottingham.

It’s fun, fun, fun, on Trams, Trams, Trams

Because if I can avoid city driving, I will do it.

The cost of this? Around £12 of fuel to carry me and all the photography stuff I needed for the day and £4.20 for the all-day tram ticket to get me in and out of Nottingham.

That is not even a contest compared to the fares offered by CrossCountry – let alone the cost of a First-Class fare.

Railway pricing has always been odd. But the pricing people off the rails is not helping

Travelling on trains has always had a challenging element, with pricing always being an issue with Return fares costing sometimes 10p more than a single fare, how a split-ticket fare saved me a bunch of money on a journey.

However, it seems the lack of capacity on routes along with restricting walk-up fares is only going to hurt rail travel going forward – especially on Inter-Regional routes.

As Great British Railways gets its feet under the table and starts to work through the important matters of fares (like it has tried to with season tickets), it’s important that the review needs to look at the capacity issues we have on the railway (for example, CrossCountry has been a no-growth operation for many years as passenger use exploded), as well as getting the balance of getting fares right.

Because if the government want to get people out of the car and onto the train, currently, they are going the wrong way about it.

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