Would more people use the train if it were cheaper? I doubt you could fit any more people on.

So you could actually increase the price here and then use this increase to reduce the ridiculous price of the Darlington- Guildford journey then?

So you could actually increase the price here and then use this increase to reduce the ridiculous price of the Darlington- Guildford journey then?

You could, but do we really want to be encouraging more people to leave Darlington?

FeeFoo – do you really not understand why?

I can guess why you think it is wrong… and I disagree, so we have to end the discussion to avoid the inevitable spiral into a pointless argument.

You could, but do we really want to be encouraging more people to leave Darlington?

Wouldn’t bother me in the slightest as I don’t live in Guildford. 😆

Well, I understand that one of the reasons that train tickets have increased in price so much is to reduce demand as there isn’t the capacity due to several reasons – decades of underinvestment and the most convoluted regulatory system anywhere in Europe.

We could ignore AGW and just discuss
1.pollution
2.Oil is running out
but hey you drive short distances in your car whilst you still can

but hey you drive short distances in your car whilst you still can

Will do!

Self righteous and sarcastic. Lovely.

yes sorry cars dont pollute and oil is infinite.
The undeniably powerful argument you used to defeat my flimsy attempts at reason leave me shamed.

I think his maths was seriously flawed. He claimed the average user of the train had above average income, but this is always going to be the case, as a large portion of train usage is commuting, and I’d bet there’s not many shelf stackers who commute by train, as they’d just get a job locally.

You could half train prices, and the average user would probably still have above the average wage. In fact, it may encourage more higher earners to take the train, making the ‘problem’ worse.

trains are pricey, but I’m not sure they should be more heavily subsidied to make them cheaper. It just makes non-train users pay more in tax..

defeat my flimsy attempts at reason leave me shamed.

Ladies and gentlemen, we have an STW first. 😉

yes sorry cars dont pollute and oil is infinite.
The undeniably powerful argument you used to defeat my flimsy attempts at reason leave me shamed

Cars do pollute and oil is finite. And…

The conclusion you draw from that is incorrect and flimsy. Feel the power of my lack of concern.

The conclusion you draw from that is incorrect and flimsy

you know what , your right, the more I think about it

but hey you drive short distances in your car whilst you still can

the more I realise this is incorrect and flimsy
Thanks for helping me see sense

trains are too cheap in my opinion
if they were more expensive the mother in law wouldn’t visit quite so often

Thanks for helping me see sense

No problem! I knew you’d get there.

I tend to think of it as a premium for the disorganised.

Lucky for you. Others can think of it as a premium on being responsive or flexible.

Read about this in the Metro this morning as I was waiting for my overcrowded commuter train with all the other rich people.

the most expensive rail travel per km in Europe for both urban and long distance
so yes it probably is a rich man’s thing

its not like branson moved into trains because he passionately wanted to make train journeys more pleasurable its because he knew it was a poorly regulated essential service he could milk for all its worth

After years of enduring the hellhole that is London on public transport, whenever I have to go in to the city now I drive all the way and find a parking space. Since the introduction of the congestion charge central London isn’t so bad in a car.

Even outside of big cities I’ve always found travelling on a train to be a bit hit and miss, sometimes it is relatively stress-free but other times the train will be packed (with ****), dirty, too hot, running late and as others have pointed out, I still need to get from the house to the station, and from the station to my destination at the other end. When it’s chucking it down with sleet in true British fashion, I’ll take the car thanks!

http://www.ipayroadtax.com

That’s all you need to know.

It’s £175 to travel at peak times for a return from Bristol to London when I need to go there for work, luckily work pays. It’s ‘only’ £80 or so off peak but that is still too much and the offpeak times are so restrictive in means that you either it’s just not practical for business unless you have just a 1 hr meeting around lunchtime or if you are going for leisure you miss half you day off having to wait for the offpeak services to start.
Having said that I have noticed that if you plot a route through London say Bristol to Ely then it really is cheap – just £13 one way, that’s going through London at rush hour when you will be paying much less for the whole journey than those who paid just for the London – Ely part of the journey.
They really should sort of the train system in this country, either than or give up on them as they are impractical to maintain (the UK is the victim of being the leader in trains in Victorian times and we are no stuck with that infrastructure).
Wouldn’t widening motorways to add long distance bus routes be better? Maybe not but something needs to be done because trains should be part of the answer to removing cars from the road but they are not.

(the UK is the victim of being the leader in trains in Victorian times and we are no stuck with that infrastructure).

The UK is a victim of being great once and then believing that the greatness simply continues without having to do anything else in spite of the progress made by others.

Our train infrastructure is problematic for 2 significant reasons
1. when first built it was carried out by private companies each competing against each other in true market forces manner. This is part of the reason that we have (or had) railway stations adjacent to each other with no connection – KingsX/ St Pancras as the most obvious. In the majority of other countries the process was organised and regulated by the government to provide the best benefit (rather than the best profit)
2. our railways were built first and since then we haven’t been invaded or had a war fought in it. Much of our infrastructure up until recently was pre war unlike much of Europe’s which is post war. The Chicago-an Thatcherite government made a deliberate attempt to run down the railway and Major’s inspired vertical unintegrated privatisation created the world’s first asset stripping property company responsible for running a railway network.

The average family car now costs £8500/year to run!

If I didn’t live at the opposite end of the country to my girlfriend it’d be the first thing to go! Much as I like the convenience, it’s a f***load of money just pissed up the wall compared to takeing the train.

Just about every trip I do costs as much in petrol as the train ticket would have done*. But depreciation, insurance, serviceing, tax add upto about £2500/year over that, if trains are a rich mans toy, cars are for the oligarchs (sp?)!

*if you have a railcard, and if you regulalry use the trains you’r an idiot not to have one.

(the UK is the victim of being the leader in trains in Victorian times and we are now stuck with that infrastructure).

I thought it was because we blew up most of the European rail infrastructure during WW2 and then paid for it all to be rebuild properly to more modern (i.e. non Victorian) standards.

CaptainFlashheart – Member

Well, quite simply, isn’t a massive part of the problem that people choose to live too far away from where they work?

Errrr, London? I would wager that whilst trains are expensive, in many many cases, a season ticket is still cheaper than housing yourself within walking/cycling distance of your city job. Plus if everyone did there would be nowhere left in London for anyone to live, and the home counties would be half empty.
S’alright for you with your deux pieds a terre, best of both worlds isn’t it?

It’s not that folk choose to live too far away from where they work, it’s the concentration of jobs in certain areas. Move the civil service / MOD out of the South East (where they have to be, err, just because) and adopt less centralisation / more tele-commuting where possible.

However, you’re talking about a massive shift in society, one which could take 20-30 years.

The average family car now costs £8500/year to run!

does is hell. you can get a brand new focus for £300pcm, lets say insurance is £500. thats £4100 a year. to use up £4400 on tyres, fuel and servicing, you’d have to be doing 30,000 miles per year. If you were doing that you’d still only see 28p/mile, which is cheaper than most train journeys

eta : those figures are all worst case. my car (mondeo) costs me £2k a year to run over 10,000 miles, with everything included

can you name any on peak train tickets which cost the same as the journey would in petrol? Bristol to London was mentioned earlier, at £175. Its £28 in fuel in an average car

The average family car now costs £8500/year to run!

How?

i have a new car at £200 a month, £100 a year for tax, £300 to insure +fuel which for my car for 12k is c£1500 at todays prices.

That totals at c£4k

I know i have a smallish car but is an average car going to cost double a smallish car?

Chaps, does your 200/300 a month pay off the car completely or do you have a ‘balloon’ payment to make at the end? If you have a balloon payment, how much is that spread over the time period during which you are borrowing the car from the finance company?

The average family car now costs £8500/year to run!

Complete bobbins.

£200 would normally just be ‘borrowing’ the car for 3 years, but I think thats the comparible cost to the train. After 3 season tickets you don’t get to travel for less cost on the train (if anything, it’d cost you more) so comparing it to the cost of keeping a car after 3 years doesn’t make sense

*if you have a railcard, and if you regulalry use the trains you’r an idiot not to have one.

Eh? An idiot, or between the ages of 26 and 50 and not a student.

Or is there some railcard I’m not aware of??

13thfloormonk – Member

Eh? An idiot, or between the ages of 26 and 50 60 and not a student.

Or is there some railcard I’m not aware of??

FTFY

*if you have a railcard, and if you regulalry use the trains you’r an idiot not to have one.

Not much good if you’re a commuter are they???

£3900 for an annual ticket for the 30-38 minute journey into central London for me. Thankfully I’m not working.

It’s £175 to travel at peak times for a return from Bristol to London when I need to go there for work, luckily work pays. It’s ‘only’ £80 or so off peak but that is still too much and the offpeak times are so restrictive in means that you either it’s just not practical for business unless you have just a 1 hr meeting around lunchtime or if you are going for leisure you miss half you day off having to wait for the offpeak services to start.

On the other hand, if you book well in advance, you can get an off-peak return for £25. That’s properly cheap.

5lab – yes, I see your point but I bet that’s where the 8.5k figure comes from. Don’t forget however, that train continues to run after your season ticket runs out and the operator has to pay for this even if no-one takes your place.

That’s the problem each time this debate comes up (again and again and again…)the actual cost of owning/driving a car is highly splintered into many differing payments, some fixed and some variable and everyone has a different take depending on the finance deals they are on. I don’t believe that any one measure really takes into account the true total holistic cost of motoring (i.e. damage to environment, cost of lives lost etc etc as well as the actual pounds spent)

Similarly it is sooo easy to quote a walk-up fare, and point out that it’s ridiculously expensive, when other much more reasonable fares are available with a bit of forethought. Also, as a matter of law train companies have to take the whole-cost view (i.e. no loss of life, lowest possible environmental impact etc etc).

Has anyone suggested cycling yet?

blopbonastick, yes there is a balloon payment but i am assuming that the car is worth nothing at the end of the term,

ie it is costing £200 a month, the value is depreciating by £200 a month.

Or another way of thinking, i am hiring the car at £200 a month.

If i was to assume the car had a residual value then the cost could be less.

Blobonastick, the big issue is that a car allows you the choice when you travel, if you are trying for cheap train fairs, you need to book an exact train in advance. If things happen you can be left with a worthless ticket.

The only train fair i am interested in is the one i get at the ticket office on the day i travel.

I only learnt to drive at the age of 33 because the train was getting silly expensive. getting a seat difficult, etc.

Now i am in the position that due to the recession loosing my job and luckily getting a new one, i need the car to get to work everyday, no trains, no buses. I can cycle but 16miles each way every day takes its tole on weekend cycling.

£3900 for an annual ticket for the 30-38 minute journey into central London for me. Thankfully I’m not working

How much extra in rent/mortgage would it cost you to live close enough to walk/cycle to work?

(Genuine, non-trolling question)