please empty your brain below
The trouble is that it's only simple when you fix some of the variables. Add a Network Railcard (why wouldn't you have one if you did several of these a year).
And ignoring advance fares is fine for an article but in real life it's madness (and I too hate having to catch train x) after all I'm going to Glasgow fairly soon for £45 and last time I went to Newcastle was £27 return.
(Bath you can do via Didcot for ten quid off though you do then need to get the xx30 out of Paddington or get off and on)
All depends how much time you want to spend looking for cheaper / slightly more restrictive tickets.
i.e. a £7.50 return ticket to Brighton (from London) using Southern services puts you on a specific train, but the same amount of money on a FCC train lets you go at anytime...
Roll on a nationwide Oyster card system where no tickets anywhere are never needed again, and fair and even pricing across the whole network is in operation! (yeah, right...)
Yes, I know advance fares are often a bargain, if you're willing/able to specify journey times, and if know where you're going in advance.
Yes, I know Network/Gold Cards cut costs for some journeys, if you have one.
Yes, I know there are ticketing quirks which allow you to save money on certain journeys.
But for the purposes of this map I needed a level playing field, so walk-up one-ticket returns it is.
I suspect it's the turn up and go bit that's going to get harder to do. Most of those comparisons with other countries that appear cheaper are compared to advance fares that are tied to a train. All TGV services are booked in advance. All ICE services are booked in advance. And any French rail service that's *not* the TGV (or an RER around Paris) makes our train frequencies here look like a luxury.
My perception is that is where the real inequalities come in.
Bizarrely, I've had a train-costs thing today as well, although mine's far weirder and far more of a rip-off.
http://www.dummies-for-destruction.co.uk/random/2011/05/ticket-insanity/
But DG's analysis is for real people who just want to use the damn things. You don't get cheaper petrol if you use your car at certain times of day, or get to travel on a toll road for nothing if you book to go through the barrier at a certain time. The car is the competitor.
These advance purchase tickets for short-to-medium distance journeys are a completely artificial way that rail companies use in order to fiddle how revenue is divided up between them. The seat on a particular train costs them just as much whether I buy the ticket now or yesterday. The train is not running full, and even if it did, they wouldn't care. So why throw money away by basing the price on when the ticket is purchased?
Please advise
Need 4 returns to the Minack Theatre for 1st June from London.
Have a spare ticket IF you’re interested?
I assume the sub-£20 fare to Moor Street was not considered as Euston was considered the "most appropriate" terminus for Birmingham - journey planners tend to show that route as it is slightly faster, but as you can see £20 will only get you to Milton Keynes on that route.
DG - the map would be a little clearer if you hadn't used more contrasty colours for the £30 and £40 rings.
dg writes: Point taken - so I've darkened the £40 colour to try to improve contrast.
Max - yes the M6 Toll (and Dratford Tunnel) have an off peak rate, but DG's point was that you can't get a special price by booking ahead for a specific time.
In the last year I've done a lot of London-Newcastle trips on a Friday night. That's £110 a return (FYI, it's only £114 return to Edinburgh, a good hour+ north of Newcastle), on some very very busy trains, with many poor sods sitting on the floor. Trains pre-6pm are almost empty. I've looked at that journey every which way, and I've never been able to make it cheaper. The gent who paid £27 return, I can only assume, was travelling at some obscure time. Unfortunately, for those of us with 9-6 jobs, going somewhere at 11am (or whenever) isn't practical.
As for the poster who finds it cheaper to go to Nottingham when visiting is Newark/Grantham parents, I have the opposite issue. £70 return to Nottingham to visit my parents on EMT, or 2x £15-20 advance singles to Grantham on ECT.
@Logistical I would imagine EMT has high passenger loadings as they've got that part of the country sewn up and many people want to go there from London. Their service is overpriced, slow and unreliable. Many a Friday night I've sat on a delayed train, surrounded by rubbish that hasn't been cleared from the last journey, wondering what my money was actually spent on.
Rant over ;)
Might I suggest that most fares are too expensive, and rather than increase off peak fares, should we not be reducing peak fares in order to reduce passenger clumping.
AC Split tickets: I live in Corby and needed to get to a funeral in Bridgewater, fare just short of £150. As I have a season ticket to Bedford I decided to check the fare from there, £54!
Logistical, I travel Corby to Bedford on most days despite it being with EMT not because. As Peterkin says there is little alternative.
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