The railways are already subsidised olddog.

If the price is the price and not arbitary why do you get situations like this?

Cost of peak day return Nottingham to Birmingham – £34.50
Cost of return to Nottingham to Long Eaton plus return Long Eaton to Birmingham travelling on the same trains – £21.60

If it’s supply and demand then can anyone explain why I had to pay £97 for a seat on a near empty train from Leeds to London?

Nothing more than greed in my opinion with train operators. At least the airlines price to get the plane 80%+ full before charging silly money and you’re guaranteed a seat. East Coast would happily charge a fortune and then have you stand in the toilet.

Highlights how preposterous it is to run a railway as a profit making enterprise rather than a public service.

Andy_B. But you bought the ticket so you were perpared to pay that amount to travel on that train at that time of the day and they were prepared to sell you a ticket at that price. They will have done sums that suggest thatt the combination of factors, including what the regulator allows in terms of profit, would have maximised the revenue for that train. Tbh they were probably making a big loss on that train and would have been happier not running it at all and cramming everyone onto fewer trains. Bur were conmitted by the terms of the franchise.

The alternatives are that the rail fares are subsidised by the tax payer and you (and, me, I’m a rail commuter) would pay less. Or allow the train company to drop some of the near empty middle of the day loss making services.

Ultimately, it costs money to run trains, either passenger pays, taxpayer pays or a combination of both.

As for airlines. They simply wouldn’t run empty fligtts, and believe me their pricing policy is ruthlessly to maximise revenues.

Highlights how preposterous it is to run a railway as a profit making enterprise rather than a public service.

Again, East Coast are operated by the Government.

East coast mainline is nationalised. National Express gave back the franchise becauae they couldn’t make money.

I agrree it may be better to kept in public hands, but still left withvthe who oays dilemma, taxpayer or passemger

Doesn’t matter – the ethos is entirely wrong.

Rusty – I agree, and the econmics are wrong too. No point privatising something when there is no competition, may as well run it centrally and in a co-ordinated way.

Still doesn’t solve the fact that getting around costs, and we pay one way or anothet.

ebygomm – Member
If the price is the price and not arbitary why do you get situations like this?

Cost of peak day return Nottingham to Birmingham – £34.50
Cost of return to Nottingham to Long Eaton plus return Long Eaton to Birmingham travelling on the same trains – £21.60

Unfortunately with the highly complex pricing structures that are deployed in the railways and airlines etc then these “pricing anomalies” are inevitable and almost impossible to eliminate (I acknowledge that the example provided is a glaring one)

However, it is important to remember that the consumer has not bought the same product from the train operator in the two examples cited and the contractual obligations of the train operator to the passssenger are not the same in the two examples.

The passenger who buys one ticket Nottingham to Birmingham return has bought one return ticket and there is one contract in place between the passenger and the train operator. The passenger who chose to buy two return tickets one for Nottingham Long Eaton return and the other for Long Eaton to Birmingham return has two SEPARATE contracts. The key word being SEPARATE.

In the Nottingham to Birmingham example, then not knowing the T&Cs etc then my thoughts would be little may go wrong.

BUT, transfer the same example to an airline with a passenger travelling from Edinburgh to New York via London, who elected to buy two tickets one Edinburgh-London and another London-New York. Two tickets, therefore two distinct contracts.

Then IIRC then from a contractual standpoint

1. Then when the passenger checks in at Edinburgh the airline has no contractual obligation to through check the passenger, and no obligation to through check their hold baggage, so they may be asked to reclaim their bags and recheck them in London
2. If the passenger has heavy or excess baggage then they may be asked to pay twice, once in Edinburgh and then again in London.
3. Oh and if they miss their connection in London (irrespective of whether the inbound flight was on time or delayed), then the airline does not necessarily have any contractual obligation to re-book the passenger onto a later flight, not pay any incidental expenses food etc nor an overnight stay if needed etc etc

In practice I am not sure how many of the full service national flag carriers etc would enforce all of this, but pretty sure that under the relevant IATA resolutions they would be fully entitled to.

Going back 15 years or more BA used to employ Revenue Protection officers at LHR to stop people checking in for the BA001/BA003 (Concorde) who had bought a ticket Paris-NYC. The BA fare PAR-NYC would have been cheaper than the LON-NYC fare, so people tried it on. If people are wondering why it was cheaper from Paris, then remember Air France where also flying Concorde directly from Paris to New York in competition to BA. It would have been 4 hours Paris to New York, 6 plus hours (at a guess) via London

I bought the ticket as I had no choice on that occasion. I had lost my prepaid cheap ticket so I guess that’s a case of demand but definitely not supply / availability.

The real issue i have is that these tickets are usually this sort of price which forces me to drive because the petrol costs around £80 for a return trip from London to Leeds while the train runs near empty because of ‘supply and demand’. I guess the petrol tax subsidises the rail company.

The airline example is not really the same thing, that’s two tickets for two journeys and it’s easy to see the advantage of paying more for one ticket.

My example is one ticket for one journey versus two tickets for one journey. There are no changes to be made, one direct journey on exactly the same train at the same times.

Just throwing this in. Ticketysplit is an app that helps you find if 2 tickets are better than one for the same journey.

Ok I will change the example to London to Sydney via Bangkok. One single flight (the BA009 IIRC) that seems to be the same as the one train Nottingham to birmingham stopping at long eaton.