Today’s operators can no longer price by quality
A few readers have emailed me regarding a statement in RAIL 836’s The Fare Dealer, where I seemed to suggest that the current £82.90 OffPeak Single between London and Manchester was cheap.
I accept that my wording was badly chosen. What I meant to imply was that the current OP Return at £83.90 was cheap, and so it would be difficult to make a new OP Single 50% of this - a mere £41.95. I do accept that the current single, a mere £1 less than the return, is by no means cheap.
Users of the Avantix fares download will notice that an OP Single is indeed quoted at £41.95 and that its code is SVH, which has been used for years since it was introduced as a ‘Half Saver’ - that is, a single charged at half the return.
This fare, however, is only available from the Virgin website and only when making a return journey. The original idea was that if you wanted to book a return journey using advance fares, and on one leg no advance fares remained for the trains you required, then you could have a walk-on SVH for that leg.
Nowadays it’s more flexible and is offered at all times, allowing you to mix any combination. It can even make wholly walk-on travel a lot cheaper.
For example, if you needed to travel from London to Manchester on the 0900 (Mon-Fri) and return off-peak the next day, and you asked at the station, the only return fare you could buy would be the £338 Anytime.
A knowledgeable clerk would probably sell you a £169 Anytime Single out and the £82.90 OP Single back (totalling £251.90), but nothing cheaper.
On the Virgin website, however, you could buy the £169 single and a £41.95 SVH back, totalling £210.95. Now, it’s because the SVH is very cheap that it can’t be sold on its own, but only as part of a return journey.
Incidentally, if you try to get around that by buying two singles (as above) and then cancelling one leg to get a refund, leaving you with just the £41.95 one way, it won’t work as both legs have to be cancelled and refunded at the same time.
The same situation applies on Virgin Trains East Coast, where a cheap single coded SSH exists at half their Super OP Return - again only available from the VTEC website. And to further demonstrate why I maintain that the £83.90 OP Return between London and Manchester is ‘cheap’, the Super OP Return between London and Leeds (which is the same distance) is £106.20 - 26% dearer per mile than Virgin West Coast’s OP Return.
This whole thing is bogged down in history. The reason VTEC fares are dearer is because that’s how it was at the end of British Rail days and, with the current railway having none of the commercial freedom BR enjoyed, the East Coast differential is dictated by capping.
In BR days, as routes were modernised they had real price increases. So fares rose when the West Coast electrification took place and those to Manchester were always dearer than to Leeds.
Forty years ago, when new Monthly Returns were introduced, it was £15.40 to Manchester and £14.50 to Leeds. The Weekend Return was even more marked: £13 to Manchester but only £9.90 to Leeds. So West Coast was up to 30% dearer than East.
Move on ten years and Savers had been introduced, but so had East Coast electrification and the latter’s fares had risen considerably: a Saver to Manchester was £31, but Leeds was £37. So East Coast was now 20% dearer than West.
As time went on and the West Coast needed upgrading again, fares were held back. So at the end of BR, Manchester’s Saver was only £43 and that to Leeds £56. East Coast was now 30% dearer than West.
I have no doubt that had BR continued and introduced tilting trains on the West Coast, it would - quite rightly - have rebalanced the fares with a real price-rise on the West. Instead, privatisation froze the differential by capping.
So it seems the West Coast has to carry on forever being 20% or so cheaper than East, regardless of any modernisation that has taken place or will do so on either route in the future. What a crazy way to run a railway.