Sorting out fares… but not with DfT in charge

I am similarly depressed by the lack of understanding of the current fares disarray among the media - and possibly even sections of the industry.

In RAIL 911’s The Fare Dealer, I had to explain how part-time seasons are not new. Certainly, some other operators did not know this.

I also recently spotted a comment that we must get rid of the system created by British Rail where “returns cost £1 more than singles” - after all my attempts to explain how this isn’t strictly true!

Let me have one more try. BR had singles valid all times. Take a £50 single. The peak return would have been £100. BR then introduced Off-Peak Saver and SuperSaver Returns (SSR), and initially a Saver might have been £60 and an SSR only £55.

After experimenting (something today’s railway cannot do with the Department for Transport in control), it found it could induce more traffic by lowering the SSR, so we ended up with its being perhaps only £45.

Now, at off-peak times, someone wanting a single would initially be sold the £45 SSR rather than the £50 single. However, it caused confusion for customers, who inevitably wanted to know why they’d been sold a return. Booking clerks therefore suggested it would be better if a new SuperSaver Single could exist at £1 less.

This is not BR charging £1 more for a return than a single, but charging £1 less for a single at certain off-peak times to avoid confusion.

After privatisation, full fares increased vastly but Savers were capped - a ridiculous move by the government, which should have capped the full fares.

As a result, a previous £100 peak return soon became £200 - no exaggeration, and my table in RAIL 898 shows how many peak fares are now treble what they were in 1995.

Indeed, we now have the ridiculous situation where a Peak Return from London to Bristol is £224, yet the Super OP Return is only £63 - but in this case Great Western Railway has gone a stage further by having a Super OP Single to match at only £36 (of which more below). How can it be sensible to charge £112 to reach Bristol in the peak, yet only £36 off-peak?

BR would never have been so stupid as to allow such discrepancies, which is why I object to silly comments about BR charging £1 more for returns than singles - better to ask why today a peak single can be more than treble an off-peak one.

So, back to that Super OP single. Note £63 return, but only £36 single. OK, that’s 57% of the return rather than 50%, but it can be done. We’re frequently being told that the industry would love to go to a singles-only fares system and that the Williams Review wants it. Who doesn’t? The DfT perhaps?

However, like part-time seasons, this is something GWR created and has sold for some years, while the rest of the industry continues to wonder how we can have a nationwide singles-only structure!

It’s infuriating that the industry ( and certainly the DfT) wonders how to proceed yet seems totally ignorant of what GWR already does. GWR does not receive a subsidy for doing this, which seems to prove that the rest of the industry could easily fall into line. Fares system sorted.

The only thing certain is that it won’t happen, not while the industry has to get DfT permission to buy a box of pencils!

Sorry, but I say it again: monolithic, unresponsive and bureaucratic. Put railway managers in charge and then we can move forward.