Now it comes to the day of travel and you have two tickets in your hand. (It’s actually five, because you also have two seat reservations and a receipt). You probably make the outward journey on the train you planned, and go to do your business for the day, and then you want to go home. You might happen to be finished early, and would like to take an earlier train, or you might be running late and want to take a later one. The question is this:
- Can your ticket be transferred to another train? It might be a standard fare, fully flexible, or it might be a cheapo, which can only be used on the specific train for which it was booked, or it might be a Virgin Advance (A B or C) or a Virgin Super Advance (A B or C). It doesn’t say any of this on the ticket. You get some clues - vaild on day of travel, valid one month, valid only with seat reservation.

But supposing you decide it is valid on some other trains, where and how do you find which ones? The information on the web is only for what you can now book, not when you can now travel, you haven’t got time to ring the helpline and wait for them to answer - that defeats the object, and you don’t want to go to the station to enquire, because then you would just hang around the station, instead of enjoying extra time at your destination.

So how can you be sure that if you go for that earlier train, your ticket will be valid?

I have written to Virgin and been given a total non-answer about reading the national conditions of carriage. Makes my blood boil.

As someone without a car, I depend on a certain degree of ease of use in public transport to try and match the convenience of a car. I’m sure sil would have converted to the benefits of public transport had this journey gone more smoothly…

It just takes a few seconds

http://www.thetrainline.com

However, away from some quite specific, mainly commuter, situations like this, I think you are right. I like the idea that you can turn up at a station, buy a ticket and just go. The good old days where railway companies would race to Scotland from London don’t really apply any more.

We’ve made savings in the past by avoiding Virgin when coming to see you, and if you had chosen to go to a ticket office they probably would have explained to you that you can either pay through the nose for a nice comfortable flashy new red train that will get you there twenty minutes quicker (if it doesn’t break down) or you can pay less for a more drafty one that stops every now and then and where the seats might come loose. We always opted for the latter, although Virgin still had crappy old trains then. What is really wrong is that they didn’t expain this to you at the ticket machine or even warn you that this can happen. You weren’t sold what you thought you were selling and you shouldn’t have to that savvy about the rail network to use it. It’s not unlikely that a trip from Stourbridge might involve a Virgin trains trip. If they can’t let you know, they should only let you buy a ticket to Birmingham where the machine there can do the explaining. It can’t be too hard to programme this kind of thing: a London Underground machine once even suggested to me that I buy a different type of ticket as it was cheaper for the journey than the one I asked for.

British train privatisation has given us the worst of all worlds: inefficient private monopolies supported by huge public subsidy. Previously we had an inefficient public monopoly support by huge public subsidy. At least the public money was previously going to a publcly owned institution.

Energy market liberalisation has been a good thing, though. Gas prices would be even higher if we still had the British Gas monopoly. Competition has increased efficiency, killed off the really bad operators and reduced margins to give us lower prices. The admin problems we see are not necessarily a result of liberalisation, as they’re most prevalent in the former regional electricity companies. If I have a problem tho’, I can switch whenever I choose. I speak as someone who has had major gas supplier problems this year - at least I’ve been able to move away and save a few quid.

The electricity market is a great example of where market liberalisation works well. I now buy my electricity from Ecotricity. The profits from my electricity bill go directly towards building new renewable energy sources and I pay no more than before. Great stuff.

BT lost its monopoly 21 years ago. The BT-Mercury duopoly only really ended around 10 years ago (if you discount the cable networks, who have only had much market impact in the past five years IMO). Electricity and gas have been liberalised since around 98, I believe. There’s still some time for it all to settle down and for truly innovative products to appear.

Trains will never benefit from the hodge podge bollockisation they’ve been subject to.