There is no train market
The other day, Niamh and I went down to London (to see the Science Museum with the Britpack and Molly Holzschlag) on the train. We first drove to Coventry, and I bought a ticket there from one of the QuickTicket machines where I can just drop my card in. An adult return to London, and a child return to London. Cost me £36.00 for the two (£24 for me, £12 for Niamh), which I didn’t think was too bad. We had a great time at the Science Museum, doing such fun things as electrocuting ourselves, admiring the Difference Engine, and stealing Meri’s Jaffa Cakes. And then we got on the train on the way home, going back to Coventry. On that trip on the way home, a ticket inspector asked for our tickets. I unveiled them, to be told that they weren’t valid on Virgin Trains (the exact comment was “we couldn’t do a ticket as cheap as that!”), and so I had to pay again. Sixty-six pounds worth of again, to be precise. Put a bit of a damper on the whole thing, I can tell you.
The key point here is this. The privatisation of the rail services, splitting it up into loads of different companies, seems design to force a market on us where no market needs to exist. Virtually no-one I’ve spoken to actually cares which train company is running the train they are travelling on. The train companies are desperate to make us care, but no-one actually does. Would you watch a train heading to your destination go past because it was run by the wrong company? And so we are suddenly forced to care when you discover that your “return to London” is actually a “return to London on Chiltern Trains only”, and you have to pay a hugely inflated price for a second time. The same situation has arisen with power companies; no-one actually cares or even really understands the difference between nPower and Powergen and all the others. The electricity I get from one isn’t somehow better than from the others; the price difference is minimal, and a labyrinthine collection of “special” offers and complex pricing schemes makes it difficult even to compute a pricing difference anyway. Mobile companies used to be like this; if you were on Vodafone it was difficult to ring people on Cellnet, or to send text messages. In the end, they all got together and made it easier. I’ve got no problem with having separate companies, but they need to understand that the ordinary punter does not care about the difference, and model their business based on that fact rather than trying to steal customers from another company.
You are planning on complaining, I hope…
73 minutes later
It’s been like that on buses for a while, although the buses in Glasgow are also part of SPT, which means that there are some options for cards that work on everything.
114 minutes later
Senji: Already have complained :)
2 hours later
Unfortunately, mate, your complaint will do nothing :( It’s the rules, we have no choice.
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.
2 hours later
Competition does work in a small number of cases. For instance, catch a lovely intercity non-stop service from Peterborough to London on GNER and it will take an hour; do the same journey on WAGN and it will take 1 hour 30 minutes, it stops at least nine times, and there is no at-seat trolley service selling a selection of snacks, beers, wines, spirits, hot and cold soft drinks, etc. You are also more likely to have someone get on at St Neots and discuss techniques of drug supply with their children. There must be some actual competition between the two companies as there are WAGN posters at King’s Cross trying to poach GNER commuters based on the price difference (which is considerable on an annual season ticket).
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.
20 hours later
Privatisation is balls. But that small fact won’t stop it, because the power and money wants it, because it gives them more power and more money. The NHS and schools are next up.
22 hours later
Would you check for the best prices / routes / times etc when booking a flight to Canada, or a few days in Malaga? What about checking the costs / how long it takes of coach trips to Edinburgh? Of course you would, you want the best price, the fastest time etc Why would you think trains are any different?
It just takes a few seconds
http://www.thetrainline.com
27 hours later
nordle: I used the QuickTicket machine, in the station concourse. It had one, and only one, option on it for trains from Coventry to London. At no point, anywhere on that machine, did it say “this ticket you’re buying is only valid on some trains”. That’s my complaint.
2 days later
Not saying anything is bad. You shouldn’t also have to that much research or be that train-savvy to travel from Coventry to London. I appreciate that a train to Paris or a plane to Venice, or even a train to Edinburgh might mean some booking and prior investigation, but not Coventry to London, especially if they’re trying to encourage day-trippers, which they always are.
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…
2 days later
I have a different issue, which is trying to understand the conditions on a Virgin ticket. (The same probably applies to other lines as well). You look at the website for a return journey. Inevitably, you then go to single journeys, where you can select two single for your chosen trains, which will be cheaper. You end up with two separate singles for particular trains that you chose. In some cases, you could have bought the same priced ticket for the train before or the train after.
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.
54 weeks later