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LNER FARES TRIAL

Ditching Off-Peak leaves passengers paying more… or not using rail at all

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NER’s scheme to remove Off-Peak tickets, currently being piloted between London and three stations in Scotland and north-east England (RAIL 1002), should not have been allowed and must not be continued.

Off-Peak fares are regulated. Failing to offer them forces many people to use the much more expensive Anytime fares, which is an increase way above what has been permitted for regulated fares.

Even the new ‘flex’ fares, when available, are often more expensive than the Off-Peak fare. It is a mistake to believe that only business passengers pay full fare. In my experience of business travel, I had to justify any travel not using advance fares.

It is people travelling on urgent personal business (insultingly usually lumped in as ‘leisure’) who mainly pay walk-up fares.

Far from improving certainty, the abolition of fixed Off-Peak fares means that anyone who cannot plan their journey ahead is entering a lottery as to how much it will cost to make their journey - or, much more concerning, to get home again.

Examples abound of situations where even if you know when you are going somewhere, you do not know to within a couple of hours when you will be coming back, or have to change plans at the last minute:

■ Visiting a dying relative.

■ Getting home from an airport after a delayed flight.

■ Having to change travel arrangements at short notice because of disruption of your original plans (for example, a broken-down car, a family emergency, or let down by another train operator).

I have personally been in all those situations. One of them earlier this year, when Avanti cancelled my booked connection from Glasgow south.

As it was the last train of the day, I had to get a refund from Avanti and travel home via the East Coast Main Line - fortunately I was starting from Dundee, so Off-Peak was available.

It is iniquitous that the railways should prey on potential passengers when at their most vulnerable.

And if the scheme is spread more widely, the so-called ‘Flex’ tickets will be useless on some of LNER’s routes, as (unlike Off-Peak tickets) they are operator-specific and trains do not run every hour.

What use would a 70-minute Flex be on an LNER ticket to Harrogate, Lincoln, Inverness, or Aberdeen? Indeed, I note that there is a two-hour gap in the middle of the day even on one of the routes which already have this system inflicted on them -Berwick to London.

This rush to make the railways more like airlines is misguided.

One of the great advantages of rail over air is that it is turn-up-and-go. If you lose that, people will migrate to air, or use the ultimate turn-up-and go op

This article is from...

Rail Magazine

6 March 2024

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