My rent costs less than a train ticket to London
At the time of writing, the cost of an Anytime Open Return train ticket from Stockport to London Euston is £338*. It is due to rise further on 2 January 2019
It’s well known that the UK’s privatised railway service rewards passengers who book far in advance of their travel date with cheaper tickets. It’s also true that the system rewards those who are prepared to travel outside of the commuter rush hour, or ‘off peak’, with lower fares.
These benefits work on a sliding scale: The more conventional the time of day you choose to travel, or the closer to your travel day you book, the higher the fare will be.
This means that if I woke up one morning and decided that I wanted to travel that very day from my home town of Stockport in the North West of England to London Euston in the South East of England (a distance of just over 209 miles or 336 km), and I wasn’t sure what time I’d be coming back, I would be charged £338 for the privilege of doing so by staff at Stockport train station.
To set that £338 fare in context:
- A monthly season ticket on Northern trains from Buxton to Manchester Piccadilly, a distance of 28 miles (or 45km), starting on 2 January 2019, will cost you £291.50.
- A weekly season ticket from Manchester Piccadilly to Glasgow Central, a distance of just over 213 miles (or 342 km) will cost you £314.20.
- An off peak return from Southampton Central to Aberdeen (travelling on the 10th January), a distance of 560 miles (or 901 km) will only cost you £196.15.
What the hell is going on?
Even before the fiasco with Northern trains unfolded in summer 2018, I had long concluded that local train services were both too expensive and too unreliable for me to consider using. As such, I get the bus instead.
Sadly, there are occasions when I do need to travel (far less locally) to and from London in the course of a single day, often to conduct interviews or research. On these occasions, the train, provided in this case by Virgin Pendolino, is the only realistic option, speed wise.
If you’re travelling from Stockport to London by road on the coach it will take you five and half hours, if the traffic’s good. The final hour basically consists of you moving at a snails pace between the North Circular and London Victoria Coach station.
On the bright side, it will cost you a lot less for a ticket on the coach (and even less for one on the Megabus) than it would on the train. On the coach you’re also guaranteed a seat and won’t have to stand for two hours. Similarly, the bon mots from the drivers compare favourably with the talking toilet on the Pendolino. If I’m staying overnight in London, I always take the coach.
Although I’ve, personally, never had to pay the full £338 to travel to Euston, the amount has burned itself into my mind these past few weeks. It’s led me to create a game I’m calling Train Fare Bingo, or, Alternative Ways To Spend £338.
What follows is a list of some of the more remarkable and/or entertaining examples I was able to come up with:
A months rent
My rent is £310 per month. With the change from the £338 I could also pay £18 for a System One Get Me There bus pass, which would give me 7 days travel on any bus company within Greater Manchester. I’d even have £2 left over for food or a very basic coffee in a non hipster cafe.
A full weekend ticket for Glastonbury Festival 2019
A full weekend ticket would cost me £248 plus £5 booking fee. I think 2019’s festival is sold out, but that’s not really the point: If I had spent a portion of the £338 on this, I would be left with £85 towards the cost of the associated travel and camping gear.
A ticket from London St Pancras to Amsterdam Central on Eurostar
If I travelled on Thursday 10th January and came back on Thursday 17th January, my fare would be £166.50, leaving £171.50. I could use that money to pay for a friend to accompany me. Or I could put it towards the cost of the hotel.
A standard return ticket on a P&O Ferry from Hull to Rotterdam
For one person with no car, travelling on the 10th and 17th January, P&Q quote a rate of £321.28. Cabin and breakfast are included.
3 General Admission tickets to see Florence + The Machine headline British Summer Time Festival in Hyde Park, London, in July 2019
The three tickets work out at £195 when using prices quoted on the event website. That leaves £143. I’m writing this in December 2018 so it’s too far ahead to be able to price up a Travelodge in Victoria for the dates in July. That said, the Travelodge in London Vauxhall is offering a family room for three people for one night at a rate of £98.85 in January, so I think there’s probably enough spare cash after tickets to cover a one night stay in July. Travel would be extra though.
Traditional Afternoon Tea at The Ritz in London’s Piccadilly with a signed Ritz London Cookbook
If I wanted to splash out for my birthday, and take two friends along, this would cost me £264 as the rate the Ritz are quoting for this is £88 per adult in January. We’d be left with £74, which would get all three of us there and back on the coach or the Megabus but definitely wouldn’t be anywhere near enough for the train.
A year’s cinema viewing at Odeon cinemas
Under the Odeon Limitless scheme, you can pay a monthly fee to watch as many films as you want. The monthly fee outside of Central London is £17.99, making 12 months membership £215.88. You could get a lot of popcorn with what was left over.
But back to the real life…
£338 is a lot of money however you look at it. As I’ve already pointed out, it’s more than a month’s rent for me. A single person over the age of 25 receiving Universal Credit is only getting £317.82 a month, and you could buy a lot of tins of beans and packets of pasta for your local Food Bank with that £338.
We have a railway system in the UK that directly works against the convenience and available financial reserves of many of the population. That penalises you for last minute travel (and some of those last minute journeys may well be emergency situations), for working a 9–5, Monday-Friday week, for wanting to get home from London before midnight, and, really, for not being well off.
Some would say that re-nationalising the railways would be the answer. Others would say that having different operators compete against each other on the same route is the answer. I’m not sure how re-nationalisation would work out, and I don’t think anyone can know unless we try it, but I’m not at all convinced by the case for competition. Mainly because I’ve lived through the de-regulation of the buses in Greater Manchester, and I have the scars to prove it.
The first time I ever travelled to London by train was in the summer of 1995 when I was sixteen. By that time the railways were in the process of being privatised but it hadn’t fully happened yet. My mum booked my train fare to Euston on that occasion. It cost her £40.
* According to trainline.com
