Ripped off by the railway - Nottingham to Crewe return

[kieron]

Might I suggest that anyone in favour of mileage-based priving answers Yorkie's questions which have appeared in most of them and are in this thread here:

Has anyone done this? It reads almost as if he expects an essay for each one. If answers like "York-Whitby would cost more, York-London would cost less, and the cheapest Peterborough-Nottingham ticket would not allow travel via Leicester" were expected, they could be a way to better understand the impact of a change on the rail network. With the supplementary questions (has it even been established that people who buy tickets from York to Whitby are both numerous and price-sensitive?), it looks more like an attempt to avoid it.

And the advantages would be?

For a traveller, it gives more certainty. You pay for the trains you use, so you don't accidentally find yourself on a train for which your ticket is not valid, or buy a far more expensive ticket than you need to just to be on the safe side.

For an operator, it means you are paid (season tickets aside) according to how many people use your services, rather than how many a model say should use them. This means that anything you do which makes your trains more attractive to the public brings revenue in this quarter.

The operator may also be able to deal with peak demand more sensitively, by (say) making a train more expensive between Leeds and Huddersfield at rush hour without vastly inflating the cost of travel along the rest of the route.

Something like Oyster? So how would you deal with "Break of Journey"? And who would foot the bill for all the equipment?

Break of journey would no longer exist as a concept, as there's no-one to tell that you're really travelling to Glasgow as you leave the train in Newcastle.

The cost of the system would be split between people who use the railways and people who don't, in much the same way as all other railway costs are. Ideally, much of the cost would be borne by those who use the railways but tend to contribute little at the moment, but I haven't suggested how that might work.

People would get used to it, though.

But never like it.

I don't think ticket machines have many fans, either.

Advance tickets would be unaffected. You commit to using specific trains at point of sale, so the price is known and the company can sell you tickets.

Ah, this is different to you statement of "charged at the point of travel rather than paid for in advance". I can see the logic of Advances continuing under such a system, but this was not the impression I got from you post.

Sorry. I was just trying to think of what would have to change if the railways charged people to use a train rather than for a journey involving one or more trains.

TVMs and ticket offices won't sell walk-on tickets, although they may still provide a way to credit your card account.

Sounds like the start of the end of ticket offices to me. They are unlikely to keep offices open (at least at medium and small stations) just to add credit when a machine could easily do that.

I wouldn't say the beginning, but it would make ticket offices less important to customers than they are now. This is a good thing.

There are things a customer would be likely to want to know before travelling, such as which train to catch to go to Preston, or how much it would cost. A call centre and a few touch screens are cheaper for this than having semi-trained ticket staff scattered around the country, though.

Season tickets would probably be replaced by something more like the zone-based tickets various PTEs promote; you buy a ticket which allows any journey between a particular set of stations, and use it like that.

I'm not sure how that could realistically work.

I was thinking of something along the lines of the Merseyrail Railpass. The value for money is less predictable than with season tickets (a 7-day LIV-BKQ ticket costs 6.1 times the price of a day return, a LIV-OMS one only 3.6 times).

You can't actually buy LIV-BKQ or LIV-OMS season tickets; they're only sold between stations shown on the map on page 9 if one end is at one of a dozen stations: Chester, Capenhurst, Bache, Little Sutton, Overpool and Ellesmere Port (but not Hooton or Hough Green) in Cheshire; Heswall and Upton on the Wrexham-Bidston line; Town Green, Aughton Park and Ormskirk in Lancashire; and Rainford for some reason.

4. Engines to work out best prices by split ticketing are under development, so the industry cannot continue to bury its head in the sand on this matter.

It may just be a bug, but I've noticed that NRE will sometimes recommend split tickets where a journey involves changing trains. For instance, Upton-Flint tickets cost £6.50, but the route finder falsely claims that "You need to buy multiple tickets for this journey" whenever it suggests changing in Shotton, at a total price of £5.30 for a single.

It doesn't suggest split tickets for Flint-Upton, so I didn't get to find out whether or not it would come up with correct return tickets.

Personally speaking, I don't think there's much to be gained from a splits program until you have a way to list the routes for which a ticket is valid. It doesn't always make sense to physically travel to your split point, after all.

 

[hairyhandedfool]

....There are things a customer would be likely to want to know before travelling, such as which train to catch to go to Preston, or how much it would cost. A call centre and a few touch screens are cheaper for this than having semi-trained ticket staff scattered around the country, though....

Call centres in India seem to be even cheaper, but I wouldn't call that a good thing. Note how ticket offices are already not required....

....I was thinking of something along the lines of the Merseyrail Railpass. The value for money is less predictable than with season tickets (a 7-day LIV-BKQ ticket costs 6.1 times the price of a day return, a LIV-OMS one only 3.6 times).

You can't actually buy LIV-BKQ or LIV-OMS season tickets; they're only sold between stations shown on the map on page 9 if one end is at one of a dozen stations: Chester, Capenhurst, Bache, Little Sutton, Overpool and Ellesmere Port (but not Hooton or Hough Green) in Cheshire; Heswall and Upton on the Wrexham-Bidston line; Town Green, Aughton Park and Ormskirk in Lancashire; and Rainford for some reason.

The thing with Merseyside is that whatever your journey there is only ever one route by rail, but plenty of journeys across the country have more than one route. So by zoning the country you risk reducing the services people can use. That is why I said I'm not sure how it could realistically work.