Reply With QuoteSupply and demand; people want to go to Bath, no one wants to go to Solihull!
Apologies to anyone from Solihull, this is firmly tongue in cheek.
I can travel from London to Solihull return 1st March for £12.50. If I want to go to Bath (same distance) it’ll cost me £59.50. Explanations would be gratefully received! Travel times much the same as is duration.
Supply and demand; people want to go to Bath, no one wants to go to Solihull!
Apologies to anyone from Solihull, this is firmly tongue in cheek.
There is no logical explanation, privatisation has apparently brought many benefits.
"Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time it's enemy action."
'Populism, the last refuge of a Tory scoundrel'.
Oi !!!!! We have Fraser Hart, Goldsmiths, lots of restaurants, bars and even dancing girlsOriginally Posted by Dave+63
The whole ticketing system has been made as awkward, complicated and erroneous as possible to simply confuse and befuddle ‘customers’ into paying the most possible.
Privatisation of rail, utilities has just brought ingenious pricing mechanisms designed to confuse and exploit.
My current beef:
"From August 2017, change is coming to the South Western rail network. FirstGroup and MTR will deliver £1.2billion of investment and will improve the experience for customers, delivering better trains, more seats and quicker journeys."
Well they've rebranded the trains and given the staff new uniforms, but I've not been on one, not one, Waterloo bound commuter train that has arrived or departed on time since perfectly adequate South West Trains became South Western Railway.
Last edited by BillyCasper; 19th February 2018 at 23:31.
Only if you own a rail company...
M
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Breitling Cosmonaute 809 - What's not to like?
GWR is more expensive anyway. Then as said it is supply and demand. There will be a set of seats for Advance prices with no flexibility. As they sell out at the lower prices the next price band up becomes the new low and so on. I have to set reminders in my phone 3 months in advance for the offsprings tickets to and from university to get the cheapest possible.
It is totally ridiculous. One example, at certain times of day, it costs more to go from Derby to B'ham (through train) than to go from Willington (which is between Derby and B'ham) Infact, you go back to Derby on one train and then get on another to go to B'ham (past Willington without stopping) the same way as the more expensive ticket.
Incidentally, a retired friend who worked at BR, and it's successors, told me he had been let onto the fact that you can save money on some long trips by buying separate tickets for the component parts of the journey rather than one through ticket! Madness that only irks the totally confused customers.
it is called split ticketing. There are websites that will try and work it out for you with various degrees of success. In the main it works by having a portion of the journey in the off peak period or a cheaper start end for a component of the journey.
Shouldn’t be/she be organising/diarising this? Part of the higher education experience is supposed to be living as an adult, or at least it was a generation ago.
Rail Fare pricing is now impossible for the layperson to understand - much the same way as airline ticket pricing now is.
Whatever the algorithms running it behind the scenes are doing, it simply makes it far beyond comprehension.
It used to be so straightforward...
Last edited by TheFlyingBanana; 20th February 2018 at 09:48.
So clever my foot fell off.
I couldn't agree more!
I type this from my seat (how lucky am I!) on the 08:31 from Surbiton to London Waterloo which thankfully was on time, however, the 08:06 from West Byfleet to London Waterloo was late and I was a little worried that I'd miss my connection. Fortunately I don't use train travel that regularly but I've certainly noticed a difference since South West Train became South Western Railway.
It's a shame because in my book SWT were always one of the more reliable train operators.
How the hell the elderly or those without a pc manage is anyone's guess, whatever happened to turning up a the station, buying a ticket and travelling?
"Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time it's enemy action."
'Populism, the last refuge of a Tory scoundrel'.
The only thing that anyone really needs to 'get' is that rail fares aren't there to be easy and transparent; they're there to make profits for bosses and shareholders.
In fairness that's exactly what I did this morning, much to the disgust of the mass of season ticket holders I'm sure.
SWR really are poor, yesterday I was stood at the station waiting for a train, the delayed train in front of mine arrived, which didn’t stop at the station I needed, the doors shut and then over the tannoy came this train now stops additionally at ..... which included my stop so I hit the door release button but it was too late.
My train was then cancelled, I needed to get home for the kids so I could either wait an hour and hope it wasn’t delayed or get a cab, which is what I did £40 instead of £7, not happy.
Ticket splitting can offer better savings if you look yourself rather than using the ticket splitting sites, it’s a faff but can save a lot of money.
I’ve split Bournemouth to Newcastle before and saved over £100 it meant booking in 7 stages and swapping seats a few time but the saving made it worth it.
It can also be worth looking at stations beyond your destination as sometimes it can work out cheaper, for instance if I’m going in to London sometimes it works out cheaper to get a ticket to Standtead or Romford than to get a ticket for London, these trains mean changing in London.
Also if you have a choice of stations to depart from play around with them, it normally cheaper to go from Christchurch to London than Bournemouth to London, for the sake of a little more time driving to the station there can be a reasonable saving.
Part of the higher education experience is also the parents subbing stuff!!
What gets me is, a off peak day rtn from my local station in West Sussex to ldn Victoria is £18 odd, to go in the opposite direction one way is £30.50.
Or £18 odd if you buy a rtn from my local station to vic in advance but pick the ticket up at Victoria, you get which one I buy now...
The fares are mad, no wonder people don’t use the trains. I looked at taking the train in April to get to Heathrow. For the 2 of us it was £599 return from North Yorkshire. The Hilton at the airport with 21 days Parking was only £169.
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Crikey! Mrs Draft being a Yorkshirewoman we use the East Coast line between Leeds and Kings Cross regularly. Admittedly we use a “two together” railcard but prebooking we would not normally expect the round trip with first class tickets to exceed £200. Did you buy tickets on the day?
No that was to book tickets for this April on the Trainline web site. Must just be the dates and times, best I’ve done was Northallerton to K Cross for £32 return and that was first back but booked a long way ahead.
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Fixed it for you.
Hahaha that works just as well !
I regularly have to make cross country journeys. More often than not, it's just easier to drive, but when I need to take the train, I usually end up booking on Trainline
What is often worth doing, if I need to make an early start is to get 2 tickets : the 1st is a day return to take me from home to a station on the way at some time around 9am. The 2nd for (by then) a cheap day return to the end station.
This usually saves money and occasionally saves a lot of money. I understand that the train has to actually stop at the mid point station for the combined tickets to be valid.
Lerwick, Shetland to Penzance for two people to see the relatives
Ferry Lerwick to Aberdeen return with outer 2 berth cabin and breakfast £300
Train Aberdeen to Penzance return first class £1,250
Flight instead of ferry to Aberdeen tomorrow return £481.88
Or flights near the end of March £370.92
Two nights accommodation needed in Aberdeen £120
I work on the railways. as a driver.
I dont pay for most rail tickets.
I must admit, the way tickets are priced is very hard to understand..let alone justify!
I have the pleasure of travelling from the NW to London at peak time about once a week and cannot book in advance for boring work reasons and it now costs £338 for an open return...
And they’ve dropped automatic refunds for void days for season ticket holders that SW Trains operated and replaced with the nightmare of delay repay. A backwards step designed to benefit South Western.
Because rail fares have very little to do with supply and demand are in fact a mixture of regulated and unregulated fees mixed with national and local public subsidies of various levels in a way that is designed to be too complex to understand.
Last edited by Alansmithee; 22nd February 2018 at 00:19.
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