I have just had one of those stunned moments which I thought I would share with you.
On the 25th of June, Alain and I are planning to take the train from Plymouth back home to Woking, so I wanted to investigate how much this would cost. I went to The Trainline and plugged in the necessary details. This is what I got:
After trying in vain to find a time when the prices would be cheaper, I absent-mindedly typed Plymouth to London. And this is what I got:
London to Woking:
(from Paddinton to Waterloo will cost 3 pounds using our oyster cards)
Ah, this rip-off explains how rail bosses can pretend the trains are running beautifully and pay themselves enormous bonuses.
It’s not just trains. I remember being stunned when my colleague told me her Paris-Lisbon trip cost more than my Paris-Boston flight, and then another colleague chipped in to tell us that her Paris-Marrakech flight was twice either of those.
Bronwen, if you have the time, maybe a hot air balloon?
That’s because only the high-end tickets are available London-Woking, so they only offer you the high-end ticket price for the whole journey.
If you know there’s an obvious break in your journey, (like cross-London) it can make sense to check whether the whole is more than the sum of its parts…
Funny. My annual Cromer-London season ticket costs £5640. I change at Norwich. Could I get it cheaper if I paid separately? No – the Cromer-London price is the same as the Norwich-London price: I get the Norwich-Cromer run (on the picturesque Bittern Line) essentially thrown in for free.
Now, here’s the interesting part. Were I to buy a return ticket each day that allows peak-time travel between Cromer and London, it would cost £81. Even three days a week (I work at home the other two days) that tops out at more than £10000 annually, almost twice the cost of my annual season. I asked a train guard about this difference. He said the discount was to reward regular season ticket holders for ‘loyalty’. Well, given the rather variable standards of punctuality, I guess they’d have to …
Heather: I really like the idea of hot air balloons, but unfortunately they don’t go well with my problems with vertigo and desire to escape confined spaces! :) And of course, the are really expensive.
Scott: Thank you for your comment! It had not occurred to me that the “special” prices did not exist for all train journeys, but of course it makes sense that journeys between big cities should be treated differently.
Aside: London to Woking involves “going backwards”. The change from Plymouth to Woking is Reading, which I suppose serves to further underline your point.
Henry: I think that it is great that you are able to get such a good deal on your train journeys. But it is just one more example that makes me feel as though there is no way that I could possibly understand the monetary value of things. Sometimes it is possible to buy a can of coke for 20 p and at other times it can cost as much as £1.50.
I buy weekly tickets between Woking and London, because I am exactly the type of person who would repeatedly lose their ticket and because, when faced with the thought of what I will be doing in 6 months time, the number of possibilities is too large for me to be able to make the step of “paying in advance” (not rational, of course, just a quirk of personality).
there is no way that I could possibly understand the monetary value of things. Sometimes it is possible to buy a can of coke for 20 p and at other times it can cost as much as £1.50.
It’s basic economics, Bronwen, as far as the can of Coke is concerned. Something is worth what you are prepared to pay for it. Leaving aside loss leaders, which confuse the economics by cross-selling, the ‘real’ price is the cheapest price (e.g. the sale price). Anything else is the extra cost you are prepared to pay for whatever reason (e.g. convenience, availability of a cold drink in the middle of nowhere on a hot day etc.)
I just went to a conference in Bristol. I did not know if I’d be travelling direct from home (Kingston) or via work (London) so I bought my advance tickets from London to Bristol and back. When the day came I did not have a travel card, so I bought a daily from Kingston to London.
So it went like this:
Kingston to London (Peak, necessary to get to work in the morning): £13.80
London to Bristol: £21.00
Returned on Sunday:
Briston to London: £10.00
London to Kingston (off peak): £6.80.
As the length of train journey between Bristol and Paddington is less than 2 hours I am now considering moving.
Before you move, Maxine, I would point a peak return to London from Swindon (closer than Bristol) is around £100, so I suspect peak fares from Bristol are evil. Or maybe I should be travelling Swindon-Bristol-London to reduce cost. There’s a green solution.
I agree with Brian. Peak fares are very much bigger than advance or offpeak fares. It’s a jungle out there.
Maybe I’ll just camp out in the office.
My better half is a huge fan of Martin Lewis and his moneysavingexpert.com website. He has this advice for getting cheap train fares. Maybe he has a trick or two that might help you save a few quid…..?
Dot: That site is brilliant! And I actually like Penzance, so it would be great to get there cheaper!
Maxine: A friend of mine commutes in from Oxford, and it is definitely more civilized than my journey (as it comes directly into Kings X), though have not compared prices. The comfort of the journey must count for something – as far as I know she always gets a seat and does not have to change, I frequently sit on the floor and end up on the underground at least for the journey in.
Oxford directly into King’s Cross? I didn’t know that. I know Cambridge and St Albans do, as various colleagues live there. I too have a commute like yours, Bronwen, please don’t give me the slightest encouragement to start on it – - it has been even more nightmarish since St Pancras International opened and the previously inadequate King’s Cross underground is coping with floods more tired, confused, luggage-heaving, non-English-speaking passengers. Oh now I have started, but in the interests of any shreds of remaining sanity, I am going to stop here.
Maxine: You are right of course – I get Cambridge and Oxford muddled. Sorry about that.
And yes: I avoid Kings Cross in the evenings, unless the circs are dire. Euston is not as bad somehow… but am a much nicer person if I just walk to Waterloo. Unfortunately, I already waft in rather late in the mornings…
I get Cambridge and Oxford muddled
I know the feeling, Bronwen!
I can’t understand why. Cambridge is the one in the beautiful setting with the most stunning cathedral in the country (Ely) down the road. Oxford is the one with decaying car factories.
I’ve lived in both places, and although one might argue that one is flat and the other isn’t, I’d even take issue with that because
I am fed up with Technorati crashing and feeling argumentativeI had to cycle over the only hill (I was told) between Cambridge and the Urals on my way to the lab (Babraham) each day.The decaying car factories round the perimeter (thriving in my first phase of living in Oxford when a lass) are now long-gone and replaced by uber-Macdonalds, bowling allies et al. amid the dreaming spires. Cambridge boasts similar monstrosities amid its divine historical monuments.
Bowling allies, that’s good. Of course, I meant alleys. Sorry.
There are so many concepts that I get muddled. The Cambridge-Oxford problem pales into insignificance beside the intron-exon, anode-cathode, east-west and left-otherleft ones1.
Maxine’s comment regarding uber-Macdonalds and bowling allies reminds me of a quote from “Life, the universe and everything” which we all know and love. I will include it here for “completeness”.
“So a lot of history is now gone for ever. The Campaign for Real Timers claim that just as easy travel eroded the differences between one country and another, and betweeen one world and another, so time travel is now eroding the differences between one age and another. ‘The past,’ they say, ‘is now truly like a foreign country. They do things exactly the same there.’”
1 I actually do “understand” them – its just that if I don’t think-before-I-speak(or-write) I have about a 50/50 chance of using the incorrect word.
Yes, Bronwen, the older I get and the more typing I do, my brain slows down at the same rate as my typing (inaccurate) speeds up. Sometimes I look at what I’ve typed and wonder from the depths of whose subconscious it came. (Left and right, that is a real challenge I agree, one I have never cracked, a bit like tying bows on shoelaces or magic eye pics (see The Scientist blog).