southern442
Established Member
In an ideal world, yes, but one cannot force passengers to take a slower train. Can you imagine the uproar?I very much doubt season ticket purchases will resume to any degree of normality ever again, but theoretically:
1) Majority of people (vast majority) with season tickets will travel on the same services to and from work, and will be able to pre-book a seat well in advance, days if not weeks, even months. There should be a refundable deposit for this in my view, although how you reclaim it (tapping in?) is anyone's guess.
2) If the worse happens and you can't book a seat e.g. because you've finished work late AND there's zero capacity left on a InterCity service, then on those rare occasions you can get the slow train home.
In that example though, London to Reading, that's the kind of route commuters should be intentionally removed from InterCity services, if longer distance passengers are being regularly left behind. Same on my regular route from St Pancras. Train rammed to Bedford, whilst people going further afield to Nottingham and Leicester etc can't get on or find a seat!
I have in the past used mainline Southern services and I have had the frustration of hundreds piling on at Clapham Junction only to then all get off at East Croydon, but unfortunately it is what it is. Do you seriously suggest that those passengers should all bundle in on the (usually already full) slow trains? Whilst it may be a while before regular commuting gets back up to the usual levels, to suggest that someone merely travelling for a day out from Reading to London or Bedford to London or Milton Keynes to London should forced to take a train that takes at least twice the time of the perfectly good and perhaps less busy intercity service is quite ludicrous.
In some cases it might even be quicker to drive and to fuel more car use is something that the DfT haven't even tried to do during a pandemic.
Forbidding these types of travellers from using the fastest train available to them will go down like a turd in a casserole at best, and at worst you'd be accused of snobbery and elitism. Unfortunately Intercity trains have to stop at places along the way and there will be people who want to get between those places and not just from London to the final destination, and express train operators have to take this into account.