Alice in Blunderland

Patrick Crozier comments on a non-regular rail user's experiences with ticketing (Scroll down to the "Alice in Blunderland" post - blogger's archiving is farkled again)

Those of use that make regular use of the railways system know how things work; what sort of tickets are valid when and where, the fact that the timetable is no more than a hopeful statement of intent rather than an accurate foretelling of the time of arrival, and that Virgin Voyagers are awful.

An aside - my latest personal horror story is my return from Brighton last weekend; due to the signalling system's inability to work properly when it rains, the one-hour journey to London ended up taking two-and-a-half hours. One of our party had a connection to Berwick on Tweed, and had hoped to spend an hour shopping in London en-route. His plans evaporated as the train sat somewhere not very far north of Brighton for the best part of an hour, and then spent another aeon waiting at Three Bridges for no apparent reason.

Returning to the subject of Byzantine fare structures, Patrick advocates an Easyjet-style demand pricing, which the price for any particular train varies depending on the demand. I'm not sure how regular travellers would take to this; we already have something along these lines with cheap book-ahead fares; the number available for a particular train varies by time, with very few for popular peak-time services, and few for busier times; this means that cheap fares for popular trains need to be booked a long time in advance.

One thing that would be very unpopular with a lot of people would be if walk-up service to disappear and all services to become advance reservation only. However convenient this might be for the operators, it removes the flexibility for the consumer that's always been one of the advantages rail has had over air.

Update: You can now read Patrick's article here.