9:38 to London no more after 13 December.

Fri 5 Dec 2008, 12:38

Chris - you paint a very bleak picture of rail travel today. You make the train sound like an elite form of transport for the rich only, like the early days of air travel when only the wealthiest in our society could afford to fly. I had hoped we had moved on from those days.

I do think £14.55 for a cheap day return to London is expensive, in the context of my current financial situation (which I certainly don't propose to discuss with you on a public forum such as this one). However, I will just say that I estimate that 5-10% of my annual earnings for 2008 will end up going to FGW so that is quite a sizeable proportion. If I think the fare is expensive why can't you just leave it at that? To you, £14.55 may just be an insignificant amount of small change rattling around in your jacket pocket but to me it seems like quite a lot of money.

There is also the question of value for money. I would accept that £14.55 is a reasonable amount of money to pay if the train always turned up and almost always ran to time but as we know this often doesn't happen. The quality of service can have a bearing on the perceived value for money of the rail fare.

I'm not going to argue with you about the relative cost of travelling by car because I don't have the figures. However, one comparison is worth making I feel and that is with coach travel. Suppose that, rather than taking the train all the way from Charlbury to Paddington I choose to get off in Oxford and continue my journey using the Oxford Espress coach. Let's also suppose I'm travelling off peak (on the 09.38 for example). The cost of a day return from Charlbury to Oxford on my Cotswold Card is £3.45. The Oxford Espress offers a 12-trip ticket (a Carnet effectively) for £60. I need two single trips to get to/from London so the cost of the coach is £10 (£60 divided by £12/2). So the total cost to me of using this route would be £10+£3.45 = £13.45. Compare this with your £14.55 and suddenly the "stupidly cheap" FGW fare is not looking quite so rosy. Bear in mind also that if I opted for this route full time then I would save myself the annual £20 cost of a Network Card and as the coach would deposit me right in the heart of London I would stand to save on Tube fares too compared with pure train travel. Yes, the journey may well take longer than by train but there would be no restrictions on when I could come back in the evening and the coach runs every 20 minutes, not just every hour or two. I'm rapidly convincing myself Chris!

Finally, shouldn't you be trying to encourage people like me to continue taking the train, rather than trying to put us off? You're making me feel that, just because I don't earn as much as the Chairman of ICI, that my custom is somehow unwelcome and my money not as good as other people's. I have been a passionate supporter of rail travel for a very long time indeed but maybe now is the time for me to think seriously about defecting to the coach. If other people did likewise you would then have want you seem to want: trains full of rich season ticket holders only and the poorer members of our society condemned to travel by road. Why can't the trains be inclusive?