THE LOTTERY OF THE RAILWAYS.....

I spend an awful lot of time ( too much) travelling up and down to meetings in London so I'm probably the world's expert on cut-price deals. This morning for example I boarded a train at St Pancras, got off at East Midlands Parkway onto a coach which took me direct to Halifax. The cost was........£5.50. £1.50 more than it cost me to get the Tube to St Pancras.
Last Friday evening en route to another meeting the cheapest option was a First Class Virgin Trains ticket from Manchester which for £34.00 brought with it limitless coffee, a couple of G and Ts, sandwiches and fruit. On Saturday I'm off to France but such is the Lottery of cheap tickets that I'm going to be Paris-bound on the bus from Victoria over the Channel ferry - £25.
It makes one yearn for the days when you could walk into a station and buy an affordable ticket without booking three weeks in advance, going on line and going through all kinds of credit card convolutions to get on track. And, fun though it is to pay peanuts for the Megabus/St Pancras deal, which is truly astonishingly cheap, this particular aspect of de-regulation is merely a loss leader till East Midands Trains gets sufficiently full to make as big a profit as possible.
Most importantly, what happens if you have a family crisis and need to get somewhere fast, have an early morning meeting in London, or are for whatever reason unable to indulge in off-peak travel at rock-bottom prices. That's right- you pay through the roof.
If people really are to leave their cars behind in bigger numbers we need accessible, affordable railways. As long as the private companies are running the show, it will continue to be a bizarre Lottery.