1 December 2016

Hooting and Shunting

Sorting the ticket price confusion.

by J.R.Thomas

How difficult can it be to run a railway?  Not the driving and signalling bits; your technically unaccomplished correspondent accepts that all those electrical impulses and wires must make a modern train very complicated.  In the good old days you just chucked the coal in the firebox, after of course remembering the box of matches and an oily rag to get the fire going in the first place. Or had to remember which hugely heavy iron lever was connected to which signal, to be seen out the widows of the signal box.  Making the trains go and stop has undoubtedly got a bit more difficult.  But surely, selling tickets, a logical and clear methodology as to what to charge people to travel on the things, cannot be too tricky, whether in the ever narrower seats (or, on most commuter services, leaning against them).

The early railways had a very simple way of doing things when it came to working out fares.  If you were a poor person, or mean, then you could travel on the wooden seats without heating at 1d a mile.  That was not what the railway would necessarily have charged if left to its own devices, but on nearly all lines in the United Kingdom, Parliament imposed an obligation to run at least one train each way per day in return for the Act of Parliament which authorised the line and the compulsory land acquisition.  In the comfortable seats with the hot water cans under the seats and the oxy-acetylene lighting, the rich and extravagant classes had to pay a lot more, but it was worked out the same way – so much per mile.  If you wanted to go to Barchester, and it was twice the distance to Much-Binding-on-the-Marsh, then you paid twice the price; whether you slumbered in comfort in the upholstered armchairs of First, or got splinters and chilblains in Third, or behaved impeccably and sat sternly upright in the middle, or Second class.

Then some marketing expert got in on the scene and started the rot.  You could now buy a day return, at perhaps one and a half times the price of a single.  Much appreciated by the passengers, no doubt, though quite what the benefit was to the railway is not so clear.  Maybe on the lines where there was competition  –  Manchester to Sheffield, or Exeter to London, it encouraged customer loyalty and stopped the passengers shopping around for a cheaper fare for their return.

But, competition, that was the thing. Many main towns had at least two routes to get to London, or to the next main town.  And in the glorious railway age before 1914, there was more competition than you might think – there were over ninety serious railway companies for a start, excluding all the little local tramways, and Welsh mountain lines, and mineral branches.  And often they were given running rights over their competitors lines (and those competitors over theirs) when they got that Act of Parliament that enabled them to get into business and drive their lines through the favourite coverts of various dukes.

So competition kept the fares down on many routes – not all, some lines were notoriously slow and unreliable and expensive, but by and large and amidst a degree of polite British grumbling the whole system worked.

Then came the  “grouping” – all the private companies were forced together in four private regional semi-monopolies – and when this had run its course, were nationalised, in 1947.  We will pass swiftly over the endless changes of direction, of structure, of leadership; the lack of investment, the endless cuts to service and quality of service; to John Major.

Mr Major’s big idea, when it came to the railway problem, was to de-nationalise the whole caboodle and reintroduce competition.  That way it was argued, investment would find its way to where it was needed, service would be responsive to demand, and prices would be driven down.  Just like supermarkets.  Except for one flaw – supermarkets tend to trade from their own premises, not all having to share one huge shed.  Trains have to run on dedicated tracks, their cost a major component of that of operating a railway.  The answer was to copy the road system – as in, we all drive our different vehicles to our different destinations for our different purposes, using the same roads, owned by us via the government, which employs its own or independent contractors to maintain them and occasionally, very occasionally, to build new ones.  So could the railways, it was argued.  An independent body controlled by the public interest, fairly swiftly replaced by the Department of Transport, would own the network of lines and many of the stations and would welcome all comers with trains to run.  That way competition could be accommodated even on the same tracks and between the same stations.

It was a brilliant solution, although compromised in the actual delivery, and it has worked surprisingly well in many respects.  Passenger carryings have more than doubled in twenty years, and are higher than they were at the previous peak in the 1920’s.  Freight movement, in spite of the loss of many old staples such as coal and steel, has also started to increase, helped admittedly by the grossly congested road system, with three major competitors who can provide open access service to almost anywhere; and a number of much smaller operators who can do all sorts of specialist transfers (nuclear flask from Kent to the Lake District?  No problem.)

But the major flaw has been around the passenger operating structures. This has been in the hands of a system of limited term franchises – operators given a licence subject to strict performance conditions and complex revenue transfers depending on carryings for, say, ten years.  But that has many drawbacks only dimly forseen.  No operator can buy the trains they need or enter into major capital expenditure for such short commitments.  Also the Department of Transport with that civil service urge to control everything has tended to make franchises shorter and subject to ever more conditions – and take back into direct control operators in breach of their franchise conditions.

Which brings us at express speed to the latest row.  That is over the tendency of ticket machines on stations, and ticket sales sites on the internet, to have an enormously complicated range of ticket prices.  Somehow the public does not seem too phased by complex on-line inquisitions and acquisitions, but the station ticket machines, on which 25% of tickets are sold, are much less helpful.  They tend to offer the most expensive tickets and do not advise that buying two singles for a return journey, or a whole series of short distance singles to make one longer single journey, or travelling via Much Binding, would be significantly cheaper.  No matter that J Sainsbury do not perform this useful advisory service either when it comes to beans or marmalade – but to be fair, in J Sainsbury you can compare the stuff on the shelves, whilst the ticket machine hides it all in a devious, if not downright inaccessible, computer programme.

Our guardians at Westminster, who are heavy users of train services, though not in the cheap seats, think this won’t do.  So more legislation is proposed so that the train operators will have to tell us that we can get a cheaper fare by pressing Button X and then Button Y twice.  Or indeed use a different operator altogether.  Get your cornflakes from Tesco, and your olive oil from Waitrose, we will soon be advised.

Or possibly some bright young minister will recall what the objective of all this was, back in the 1990’s, and make his name by reintroducing the concept of competition on rails. Different operators with competing levels of service, blue trains, red trains, yellow trains, fast and slow, luxurious and spartan.  Choice, competition, service.  It might just work.  As it did a hundred and fifty years ago.

 

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