If someone with time on their hands went through the backfile of Railnews (more than 700 editions) and pulled out each issue which included a story about the complexity of rail fares, they would have enough sheets of newspaper to wrap a lorry load of fish and chips.
The nonsense which is the National Rail tariff has been getting worse for many years. The original culprit was ‘market price’ fares, as opposed to those simply calculated on distance, in the 1960s, when British Rail was short of money and firmly in the grasp of economists whose knowledge of financial matters may have been infinite, but who knew very little about railways or, indeed, what it was like to travel by train.
Charging ‘what the market will bear’ was not, in itself, particularly damaging perhaps, but the 1980s began to see the first rumblings of ‘yield management’, in which every seat on every train can have its own price.
From this came the present disaster, and we use the word deliberately. Matters were made worse by privatisation, and we are now in the position that a railway system with roundly 2,500 stations providing some 20,000 passenger trains a day can have 55 million possible fares.
There have been a number of tinkerings over the years, such as attempts to abolish return tickets on a few routes, which tends to add to public puzzlement because it is inconsistent.
The individual operators had a field day once privatisation had given them a relatively free hand. Peak and off-peak (logical enough, and known to exist since at least the 1940s) were made more confusing by the addition of ‘Super Off Peak’, while each operator decides the time limits for each type of ticket, so that Operator A declares that off-peak starts at 09.00, while operator B says it is 09.30. Operator B, by the way, doesn’t offer Super Off Peak at all.
A row is now brewing (again) about the plight of passengers who get caught up in the machinery, and who plead (often in vain, it appears) that the ticket machines at their departure station weren’t working and are given a £100 penalty fare as punishment.
Of course, some people are on the fiddle. There have probably been passengers trying to evade payment for their journeys ever since the days of the Stephensons and Brunel. We have no time for such cheats, but there seems to be overwhelming evidence that many people are not cheating, but are simply baffled by the rules. Rightly, many cases are now being reviewed.
It is wrong to baffle customers, and it flies against any idea that the railways are there to provide a service. There is a lot for this government to do, but giving fares a radical overhaul must be high on its list of transport reforms.
To misquote an old HMRC slogan, buying a railway ticket doesn’t have to be taxing.