I’ve mentioned before that it is possible to write an essay about every UK rail journey. I have something of a backlog – I hope soon to find time to explain to the world the horrors of weekend engineering work – but want to give yesterday’s journey a mention.

I went on a day-trip to Birmingham, taking in the National Trust Back to Back houses and the Barber Institute of Fine Arts. Both well worth-while.

But as ever with UK trains, as much emotional energy is expended on the journey as at the destination.

I bought advance tickets for £8 outward (11:03 Euston to 12:27 Birmingham New Street), £14:50 return (19:10 Brum to 20:34 Euston) weeks ago. There are no reservations (phew!) on Cambridge trains so you can take any you want to London. This in itself is daft, since, if I’d wanted to, I could have added to the crush on the country’s most overcrowded train, the 07:15 from Cambridge – incidentally shortly to be increased from 8 carriages to 12, which will still not be enough for everyone to have a seat, as passengers might expect, given the extortionate fares at commuting times.

I passed on the 07:15 yesterday morning and instead took the 09:15, which actually goes at 09:20 (virtually all the other fast trains are on the quarter hour in both directions), since keeping things simple for the travelling public is not very high up First Capital Connect’s priority list.

The fares were cheap, but this is not the product I want. Nor do the vast majority of the travelling public. What we require are reasonably priced walk-on fares.

The point, of course, is that the penalty for missing the train applicable to your ticket is severe. I read somewhere of someone having to fork out £200 for a new ticket on the Birmingham train. So one reason I took a train (the 09:20) to arrive at King’s Cross (a few minutes walk from Euston where my Birmingham train departed at 11:03) shortly after 10am was to minimise the possibility of missing my connection.

The stress continued through the day, of course, as everything had to be timed to ensure I was at the station in good time for the 19:10. All this, of course, adds considerably to what I term the effective journey time. You end up creating a lot of dead time making sure you don’t miss the sodding trains.

But Virgin managed to increase my train stress levels still further. Get this: when I looked at my train tickets the evening before I saw that the reservations were correct (I’m sure I checked these when the tickets arrived the day after I bought them online). But somehow the actual Cambridge to Birmingham tickets – referred to by number on the reservations – both said “From: Cambridge; To Birmingham”. How could this happen? It seems that when you book tickets online they’re not, as you might suppose, printed automatically. The operation, it appears, is not entirely controlled by computer. No, room for human error has been allowed. I strongly suspect someone takes your online booking and types it again into the ticketing system!

Reflecting on this, and the melee of ticket inspectors at Euston, a cynic might conclude that the UK railways are in reality a very expensive job creation scheme. I couldn’t possibly comment.

Anyway, more stress, as I had to check at Euston that Virgin Trains weren’t going to get arsey and leave me stuck in Brum without a valid return ticket. Then I had to get a replacement ticket issued at Birmingham New Street, which required supervision by a supervisor apparently, though I was careful to explain the problem carefully and the staff were reasonably reasonable – though an expression indicating he’d scented blood flickered across the face of the ticket inspector on the return journey, before I wheeled out my careful explanation again, in my most polite deferential manner. Advice: keep on the right side of these guys!

Still, the trains ran moreorless to time. The 19:10 left Brum a little late, but must have arrived at Euston a little early, as I reached King’s Cross at 20:42, which would have been pushing it if we’d pulled into Euston at the scheduled time of 20:34. Perhaps I should explain how such an early arrival can happen. The point, of course, is that the train timetables are padded. The LSE reported recently (pdf) that “on many routes… it is now no faster to commute into London than in the immediate post-war period, and it is substantially slower than in the 1970s”. I suspect a large part of the reason is an unintended consequence: my guess is that the rail companies have more to gain from ensuring their punctuality targets are achievable than from attempting to speed passengers to their destination as fast as the expensive technology will allow.

Luckily, then, I was at King’s Cross in time to catch the 20:45 fast train to Cambridge. Except there isn’t a 20:45. I took the 20:52 slow train, but this arrives at Cambridge after 10pm, around about the same time as the 21:15. In other words after 20:15 there is effectively only an hourly service to Cambridge. If you can’t control when you arrive at King’s Cross very accurately – assume you arrive there at a random time – then your average effective journey time is 15 minutes longer once the xx:45 fast trains stop running. Explanation: earlier in the evening you have to wait an average 15 minutes for a fast train; after 20:15 you have to wait an average 30 minutes. Catching a slow train at 20:52 or 21:52 or 22:52 gains you virtually nothing (especially as these trains are even slower than the xx:52 services during the day).

Of course, I could hardly argue that a 20:45, 21:45, 22:45, 23:45 and so on should be operated if there were no demand. But there is. Even with the current service, when a lot of people must choose to carry on what they’re doing in London a little longer to catch the fast 21:15 rather than rush for the 20:52 – heck, a lot of people must choose not to take the train to or via London so often in the first place because the evening return service is so poor – the 20:52 is packed when it leaves London and at least half full (that’s a hundred or two passengers, paying probably at least £6.00 on average for the return leg of their journey – do the math) when it reaches Cambridge.

And, to rub salt in the wounds, the 20:52 only has 4 carriages. Last night people were standing when it left London, although I managed to get a seat near the toilet. Luxury. To me this represents a complete breakdown of public control of the train operating companies, because it is completely unnecessary to reduce the train to 4 carriages. The line supports 8. No doubt the train company saves a few pounds, but this must be far exceeded by the cost in passenger inconvenience and discomfort. It seems to me it would be fairly simple to sort this out. Just apply a levy to the ticket revenue for any trains over 70% full. Above this level the passenger experience degrades. You have to sit in seats you don’t want to, couples and groups can’t always sit together and so on.

I simply can’t understand why politicians aren’t falling over each other to propose solutions to the mess that is the UK railways. Don’t they want our votes?

It’s simply a matter of setting the rules to prevent the operating companies short-changing passengers and to give them the right incentives – sticks and carrots – to run the service people want.

I love the polls that, every day or so, appear on the Cambridge Evening News (CEN) website.  Some seem designed to elicit a particular answer – one can hardly be surprised, for example, that 96.5% of 1552 respondents answer the question: “Can Cambridge sustain a population the size of Manchester?” in the negative. Perhaps the findings would have been a little different if they’d asked: “Do you think Cambridge could grow to be larger than Manchester by late in the 21st century?”

Other questions do seem to tap the wisdom of crowds. The 28.9% of 724 who selected the option “Bin bag” to the question “What is the Fen tiger?” may well have a point.

And “Would you use an Oxford to Cambridge rail link?” (63.9% of 781 say “Yes”), may well belong in a category of legitimate market research.

After my rant about the cost of a Day Return train ticket to London, I was pleased to see the CEN asking the public: “How much do you think an off-peak return train ticket from Cambridge to London should cost?” It’s not a brilliant question since, not only does it fail to make clear whether it is asking about a Day Return or (the more expensive) normal return, most passengers also pay less than the full price – my £13.20 was the full off-peak fare discounted by 34% with a Network card (£20). Infrequent and/or non-student, adult but not Senior passengers without a discount card would pay exactly £20. Obviously, if you have a discount card, its cost has to be spread over all the journeys you make in a year. It’s a shame CEN didn’t sacrifice simplicity for a little more clarity and add “for regular travellers with a Senior, Student or Network discount card” to their question.

Nevertheless, the CEN poll results imply that, based on a sample of 930 people, the Cambridge public believes it is being seriously overcharged: a large minority (42.4%) believe the cost of an off-peak day-trip to London should be £10, and only around a third (35.1%) think it should be more than a tenner. Of those 35.1%, 24.7% believe the price should be only £15. Since £15 is around the minimum you can pay, taking the cost of a discount card into account, it’s likely all but 8.4% of respondents to CEN’s poll believe they are being charged.

I wonder how many of those who answered CEN’s question believe, like I do, that the route is highly profitable, and that these profits are largely being used to subsidise the rail network in other parts of the country?

In case my Martian readers are online today, I should describe the background state of affairs: the UK has not only screwed up its trains, the dental service has also been seriously dysfunctional since at least the 1990s.  The main problem tooth-wise is expense, since the NHS service we all pay our taxes for is chronically under-resourced – dentists aren’t paid enough for NHS patients, so have taken their drills to the private market. Nowadays, when a new dentist announces they’re taking on NHS patients, it’s like when fresh fruit arrived in the north of the Soviet Union.  People drop everything and queue.

Obviously, we’d all be better off without the NHS provision (not that I actually advocate this solution, I’m just making a point), now, since not only would our taxes be lower, the (lower end of the market) private prices are elevated by the fact that some people have managed to keep themselves on an NHS dentist’s list (though a significant number of people resort to the use of pliers for self-extraction).  Come to think of it, it’s a similar type of screw-up to the housing market, really.  I was removed by my previous dentist from his list in around 1998, for not going often enough!  I had a couple of extremely painful experiences at the next dentist I tried (on the second occasion she still hadn’t found the nerve after 5 local anaesthetic injections).  Once I found a good dentist, then, naturally, I stuck with him, even after I’d moved away from the area.  And, no, I’m not telling all and sundry who he is!

So this morning I rose bright and early (actually I could have had a lie in, because, as will become clear, it’s better to wait until the commuters have left the city), brushed, flossed, rinsed and made my way to Cambridge Station in good time to catch the 10:20 to London, the first train for which you can buy the cheapest tickets.  I stress that I arrived at the station in good time, since the queue for tickets at either machine or desk, was (as I’d expected) a good 5 minutes.  I mention this – it’s usual at Cambridge Station at many times of the week, with a minimum of a 5 minute waste of time to be expected on Saturday mornings and Friday afternoons, as well as, it seems, for the first cheap train of the day – because I’ve just had a look at the latest Passenger Focus report on value for money(!) on the UK’s trains.

Section 9, p.20 of the report suggests passengers should not have to queue for more than 3 minutes off-peak, 5 peak.  I can’t help noting that the peak/off-peak times make no sense for ticket sales, since most peak-time travellers are commuters with season tickets, so don’t need to buy a ticket.  Perhaps this explains what is evident at a glance from the Passenger Focus report, that the 3 minute off-peak target is achieved much less often than the 5 minute peak-time target.  The data looks a bit – how do I put it? – stupid.  I suggest they just have one target, 3 minutes.  And bring in some fines to make sure 3 minutes is actually achieved.  But what is also needed, it seems to me, is an edict that machines should be added to stations until there are no queues at them (as is the case in some European stations I know, den Haag Centraal, for instance).  Today, I used the multi-queue for the ticket desks at Cambridge Station (6 desks now, I acknowledge, in a rare, but insufficient improvement).  The point is, if you have to queue for a machine, you may wait for a long time behind someone having difficulty with the options (it’s not surprising that this happens, maybe some design of the screens is called for – just perhaps?), or the bloody thing may refuse your card.  And whatever you do, buy any complicated tickets from a real person at the counter!  The cost of the machines must be small compared to the value of the time passengers spend queuing.  And the marginal cost of each extra machine is even smaller – the cost to produce them is surely (like for other manufactures) mostly attributable to design, software, and tooling up for manufacture.  Queuing for machines!  They wouldn’t have believed you 50 years ago – it’s like a science fiction dystopia!  If there’s no queue, people will at least try to use a machine rather than what is the most expensive resource – the human ticket-seller.

Actually, I don’t think it’s cost that explains why there are uniformly too few machines in railway stations in the UK.  I’m beginning to wonder if it isn’t too difficult (or at least too much hassle) to deal with the inevitable consequence – a reduction in the number of ticket-counter staff – because of the militant RMT and other unions.

What I really wanted to write about (as I said before, you could write an essay about every train journey in the UK), though, is the exorbitant cost of the journey.  I used to buy One-day Travelcards – which include use of the tube and buses – when travelling to London, for the flexibility.  But, partly because of the new restriction that you cannot use the return portion of Off-peak (i.e. reasonably priced) tickets between 16:30 and 19:00 (though, unbelievably, if you buy a cheap ticket from London to Cambridge, you can use it at these times!), I now usually just buy returns to London, rush back rather than spend an hour or two in a museum or whatever, and use an Oyster card whilst there.

The last Off-peak Travelcard I bought from Cambridge to London (via King’s Cross) cost me £11.90.  But that was in 2008.  Today the price was £13.20, a 10.9% increase!  Frankly, this is getting ridiculous, as I’ll explain.

But first, let’s compare like with like.  Some years ago I wrote to Douglas Alexander, then Transport Secretary (there’ve been a few since then – does that tell you anything?), noting the rise in price of One-Day Off-peak Travelcards (with Network Card discount) from Cambridge to London.  I can now extend the series:

2003     £11.55

2004     £12.60     9.1% increase on previous year

2005     £13.85     9.9%

2006     £14.85     7.2%

2007     £15.20     2.4% (presumably lower because of the new afternoon restrictions)

2008     £15.85     4.3% (lulling us into a false sense of security)

2009     £17.50     10.4% (out of the blue – it’s a record!!)

Overall, in 6 years the ticket-price has risen by 51.5%!

In comparison, the ONS provides the latest RPI figure – 210.1 for January 2009.  It was 181.3 in January 2003 (I downloaded the table a while back).  That is, prices in general have only increased by 15.9%. The difference – 51.5% versus 15.9% – is, frankly, ridiculous.

That’s right.  Prices in general (RPI) have risen by 15.9%.  The train ticket I’ve relied on since I moved to Cambridge has gone up by 51.5%.  And the service has been seriously degraded by the introduction of the draconian restriction on when you can use the ticket to travel back to Cambridge – you have to return either too early to do anything in London in the afternoon, or too late to do anything in Cambridge in the evening (like eat at home at a normal time).

What really pisses me off, though, is that I think I know the reason for this injustice (besides RMT members’ belief that they have a God-given right to earn more than their work would merit in a different environment).  The point is that the franchise system in the UK works by awarding monopoly pricing power to the highest bidder.  The price to the franchisee in some regions is negative (i.e. some routes are subsidised), but for the franchise that includes Cambridge it is in the tens of millions of pounds per year (there’s no way to determine the value of the Cambridge route, and therein lies part of the problem).  The cost of the ticket therefore bears no relation to the cost of providing the service. This is a crime.  There is no mechanism – tragically, as there is even competition from Cambridge, you can travel a little more cheaply to Liverpool Street, though that happens to be usually way out of my way – for supply and demand to determine the correct price for the route.

The Passenger Focus report notes that the cost of tickets into London is higher than to other cities in the UK, yet there are more frequent services.  I found no real discussion of why this should be the case.  Have these people never heard of economies of scale?  If the market were functioning correctly (so that comparative prices reflect comparative costs), prices for travel into London would in all likelihood be considerably lower than to other cities.  Passengers in the busiest parts of the network are massively subsidising those in other areas.

The reason train travel into London is so expensive is, I suggest, because the market will stand it.  The train price reflects the cost (in money and time) of the alternatives.  Only the nobility can really afford to drive into London: you have to be stupidly brave, wealthy and have a lot of time on your hands.

The tragedy is, the rail network should be allowed to expand in the areas where a profit can be made.  There should be even more (e.g. fast, late night, early morning, every 15 minutes, not 30) services between Cambridge and London.  If parts of the network were allowed to grow, then, over time, the network as a whole would become more profitable.  The franchise system and consequent monopoly-pricing of rail tickets is one factor preventing the growth and modernisation of the UK railways.

As I said, it’s a crime.

I’ve skimmed through most of the latest Passenger Focus report.  There’s not a mention of the effect of the deeply flawed franchise system on ticket-pricing and hence value for money.  In fact, it reads like internal company market-research.  But of course, that’s what you’d expect from an organisation that appears to have no true independence from government.

Rather than sponsoring this flannel, the DfT should be getting its teeth into the task of making the rail franchise system work for passengers.

When someone says, literally, or in effect: “Listen to me, I’m a Professor”, be suspicious, very suspicious.  Because the truth is, Professors are just as likely as the rest of us to spout misleading garbage.  But their gibberish is more likely to be published, simply because the average editor thinks: “Letter from a Professor – must be worth a column inch or two!”  If you’re told it was written by a Professor, the chances are therefore higher than otherwise that what you are reading is poorly thought-through drivel.  Furthermore, having their output published more often provides the said Professors with the positive reinforcement that encourages them to submit for publication more material in the same vein as the rubbish that shouldn’t have been published in the first place.

I was therefore immediately sceptical when I read the last of an interesting clutch of letters in this morning’s Guardian on the topic of the UK’s procurement of new trains.  A Professor Lewis Lesley of Liverpool wrote:

“At £5.4m per carriage, these are the most expensive trains ever. For the same money, 30,000 high-speed luxury motorway coaches could be acquired, increasing the total size of the UK bus and coach fleet by 50%.”

I think he means that you could get 30,000 coaches for the £7.5bn cost of the whole order, not for £5.4m.  The order is for 1,400 train carriages, plus locomotives, so, including the cost of the locomotives (expensive, because they’re dual diesel/electric) one train carriage costs as much as around 21.5 coaches.  Hmm, maybe that’s not too unreasonable.

But, still, 5.4 million pounds – wow, that’s a lot of money!

Or is it?

Let’s assume, for ease of arithmetic, that the carriages seat 54 people each on an average trip (it’s probably more, since they’re filled like aeroplanes these days).  So that’s £100,000 per seat.  Wow, still a lot.

Wait a sec.  These carriages will be in service for decades.  Let’s just give them 20 years (they’re actually expected to last nearly twice as long as this, but, as you may have guessed by now, I like to make conservative estimates *).  Now we’re down to £5,000/seat/year.

See what I’m driving at?

Divide just once more and we see the cost is less than £15/seat/day over the 20 years.

And, of course, these trains can make, let’s say, two return trips (another conservative estimate) on one of the UK’s main lines every day.

So, for a single journey – London to Manchester, say – the portion of your ticket price needed to cover the investment in the rolling stock is at most a princely £3.75.

Think about that next time you shell out as much as £360 for a walk-on ticket, as the Guardian’s consumer champion reported on Saturday.

There was a reason why I scrutinised Professor Lewis Lesley’s “argument”.  I would much prefer a future where I am able to travel around the UK on high-speed trains than “high-speed luxury motorway coaches”.  This is a contradiction in terms: “luxury” and “coaches” do not belong together in the same sentence.  And virtually every vehicle on the UK’s roads is capable of exceeding the 70mph speed limit.  Only an idiot (or perhaps a Professor) would contemplate purchasing a fleet of coaches incapable of sustaining 70mph.  What the adjective “high-speed” is doing in the Professor’s sentence is therefore anyone’s guess.

Look, travelling by coach is an unpleasant experience.  That’s why, by and large, you find, proportionally-speaking, considerably more impoverished students on coaches and highly-paid Professors on trains.

It was when he started on the merits of promoting coach travel (in some unspecified way – presumably state diktat) that George Monbiot lost me in his (nevertheless worthwhile) book Heat.

Look, guys, if you’re going to get everyone out of their fossil-fuel powered cars and aeroplanes, then please, please provide an alternative vision that people can believe will improve their lives.  Heck, why not try to capture their imagination once in a while?  Because you’ll never get enough people to wear a hair-shirt.

Oh, and I agree with the Guardian’s correspondents who say we should be completing the electrification of the rail network, not buying diesel locomotives.  Getting rid of the need for dual-powered trains would also reduce the cost per carriage-seat even further, of course.

In fact, of course, the main costs of your rail (or coach) journey are fuel, staffing and maintenance of the infrastructure (not necessarily in that order), the last two of which are subject to economies of scale, so that the cost of rail travel should start to reduce if you can get the network into a dynamic of continued expansion of passenger numbers.  If the railways are run on renewable electricity, then in the long-run, the fuel cost will come down, because the cost of generating the energy will ultimately be subject to the scale economies of manufacturing.

Of course, the most significant cost to society of train or coach journeys is most likely the passengers’ time.  Perhaps this should be borne in mind by Professors making the recommendations on which Government transport policy is no doubt based.

—–

* Another way of looking at this is that the cost of the capital (think of it as a mortgage) to pay for the carriages would be something of the order of 5% pa – another reason for choosing the figure of 20 years for the lifetime of the carriages.

A comment piece by Philip Stephens in the FT caught my eye today.

Some wise words, not least about the bad timing of the Stansted protest.  I noted it was a distraction from the (under-reported) Poznan talks.  It’s clear too that – as implied in Stephens’ article – the rejection of consumerism is likely to find more support in boom times than during a recession.

Stephens’ main argument, though, is that, in general: “Self-flagellation does not sell” (unless, of course, the customer is Max Mosley trying to set an example to the F1 teams by reducing his costs), and that: “The case must be framed as an opportunity rather than a burden.”  Indeed.

I do disagree on one point, though.  Stephens writes:

“The young campaigners at Stansted had a point. There is something odd about the British government’s twin commitments to lower carbon emissions and to promoting a headlong expansion of London’s several airports.” [The grammar is not mine!].

If we just stop building runways we’ll just end up with even more overcrowded airports, and all but the most affluent will be forced to fly at inconvenient times.

No, what Plane Stupid should be doing is renaming themselves to something like Train Crazy and relocating from Stansted to King’s Cross (for some reason Gerald the Gorilla comes to mind as I write this).  Perhaps they could all dress in sardine costumes, invite the TV cameras and see how many of them could cram into a carriage on the 17:15 to Cambridge on a Friday evening (returning the space to the travelling public before the train leaves, of course).  Maybe highlighting the dire state of the rail service – and showing a little consideration while about it – would garner a little more support than screwing up people’s holidays.

The title, for those who might miss the reference, is a small homage to Fritz Zwicky, a cosmologist who doubted the Big Bang theory.  I strongly suspect that his scepticism will eventually prove to have been fully justified, but his cause was not helped by his habit of referring to his colleagues as “spherical bastards”, that is, bastards whichever way you looked at them.  In return, they ridiculed his theory of “tired light“.  How to win friends and influence people, eh!  I suspect though, that Zwicky was doomed by being very much in the minority, whereas I reckon I can get away with a corny dismissal of the activities of Plane Stupid because on this one I am very much in the majority, notwithstanding Leo Hickman’s attempts to justify the group’s action.

Whichever way you look at it, the invasion of Stansted does the cause of saving the planet from global warming no good at all.  Here are a few ways in which it is daft:

1. It creates cognitive dissonance in the mind of the average punter, who is struggling with his conflicting desires to jet off to Dublin for a stag do and to preserve the planet.  Actions such as this latest jolly wheeze send the message that global warming is a cause for smelly privileged students, not the mainstream.  It’s not sensible to provoke this sort of reaction.  A far superior strategy is to create sufficiently widespread feelings of guilt that people put up with the necessary measures – taxes and so forth – that will encourage alternative technologies or patterns of travel and other consumption.  So in this regard, Plane Stupid’s actions are counterproductive.

2. The protest seems to have been directed at the proposal to increase Stansted’s capacity.  Hence the threat to move on to Heathrow, where a new runway is also planned.  Now, failing to expand these airports will simply focus the industry on using the space more efficiently.  What you actually want them to be doing is using fuel more efficiently. We need to change the technology, not slow the increase in flying in the UK, which is the most the protestors could achieve.

3. If Heathrow and Stansted do reach capacity, then businesses that generate a lot of air-traffic – financial services, say – will simply relocate where the protestors can’t bother them.  Dubai, say.  The global warming problem will not be solved by reducing transport capacity.

4. There is a complete lack of vision.  It may turn out that aviation can be decarbonised more easily than other modes of transport.  There’s certainly a lot of scope for short-term energy savings.  Flying is high value-add, so may attract investment in low- or zero-carbon technology more effectively than, say, legacy rail systems.  Obviously, if we don’t have enough airport capacity, we won’t be in such a good position to exploit any advances in aviation technology.

5. Back on the psychology of the issue, surely the public is more likely to support a positive vision?  Why not campaign for the full electrification of the UK rail network?  Or for new routes?  For example, Stansted is by far the most convenient airport for residents of Cambridge and the surrounding area.  But Cambridge has no good rail link to the North – you usually have to change at Ely just to get to Peterborough to pick up the East Coast main line.  Surely many, many journeys could be moved from air to rail were there a fast train route from Cambridge to Peterborough.

In general we’d be best off building plenty of transport capacity, and making sure that the price of travel reflects as closely as possible the cost of fuel and hence carbon emissions.  That way, people will reduce their emissions simply by choosing the cheapest way of getting from A to B.

Nope, whichever way I look at it I can’t avoid the conclusion that actions such as the occupation of Stansted airport are counterproductive.  Plane Stupid by name, plain stupid by nature, that’s what I say.

Amazingly, the Cambridge to London King’s Cross rail service operated by First Capital Connect (FCC) continues to deteriorate.

I’m a reasonable person and am prepared to accept that I might have to stand on a train if there really are more passengers than the network can handle.  This is a signal that more investment is needed.  Though, when trains end up running at 160% or more of capacity, as is the case for some commuter services to/from Cambridge, it is clear that the process for upgrading lines, (mentioned in FCC’s Wikipedia entry, with which their PR department must be well-satisfied) is pathetically unfit for purpose.

But it is totally unacceptable for passengers to be inconvenienced because the operator decides to save a few £s by running infrequent services or 4- rather than 8-carriage trains.  My better half reports she had to stand on the 20:15 from Cambridge to King’s Cross (KX) Sunday before last (30th November).  I suspect this was a 4-carriage service, but the problem is compounded by the fact that on Sundays fast services to KX run only hourly.  The only apparent reason for not running half-hourly services is the convenience of the rail staff.  If this hypothesis is correct, the answer is simply to find some people who are prepared to do the jobs the public actually requires.

There are other times when the half-hourly fast service is not run, such as from KX after 20:15 in the evenings on weekdays and (even worse, because there are no fast trains later on) after 19:45 on Saturdays. This makes some trips to London considerably more tedious.  Since the trains (taking 1 hour or even 80 minutes to get to Cambridge) that are run are busy, there would likely be even more demand for a decent service.  Likely the operator is leaving money on the table.

Apart from anything else it is confusing to have such an irregular timetable.  This Sunday (about which more later), myself and partner intended to meet friends for a quiet Sunday evening beer so turned up at Cambridge Station expecting a 16:45 service to KX.  No such luck.  We had to wait for the 17:15.  It clearly wasn’t just us who are often caught out by the timetabling.  There was standing room only in the waiting-room.

Recommendation 1: It should be a condition of the franchise that a regular half-hourly fast service to and from Cambridge is run throughout the operating week.

I was lucky to get the last seat on the 15:45 from KX to Cambridge last Thursday (4th December), which only had 4 carriages.  A number of people had to stand the whole way to Cambridge.

It is totally unacceptable that insufficient train capacity provided on a regular basis, totally unnecessarily. We have to take the gloves off with the train operating companies.

Recommendation 2: The franchise terms must include a levy on the operating company (exceeding the profit from running the train) for any service run more than 90% full, excluding those rush-hour services for which network capacity is insufficient.

Now I know why have not managed to blog every train journey I make, as I once intended.  There is so much wrong with the operation it takes too long, and when you get home you really just want to forget about the whole experience.

Back to this Sunday’s journey.  The train shuddered to a halt just after Hitchin.  The driver came on the tannoy reporting an incident on the line ahead.  Eventually the information was that someone was injured.  The train reversed back into Hitchin Station and a few people decided to catch trains back to Cambridge, perhaps in order to travel to London Liverpool Street, the alternative route from Cambridge – though much slower, especially on a Sunday.  Eventually we were told that buses to Welwyn Garden City (to meet another London train) had been ordered.  Most passengers disembarked, but there were no buses and two or three staff who said they’d been told 1/2 an hour earlier that the buses would arrive in 10 minutes.  A few people took taxis at £10 a head to Welwyn…

The train had been scheduled to arrive at KX at 18:03.  We found ourselves standing in the cold in Hitchin as the clock ticked towards 7pm.  It was no longer me worth going to London.

I recollect at this point that I intended to recommend the cosy little curry house in Hitchin.  It’s on the right no more than 1/4 mile towards the town centre (just turn left out of the station), next to a boarded-up pub.  I had an excellent chicken rogon josh – I always feel the tomatoes should be in the dish, not a garnish on top, and in Hitchin they used fresh tomatoes.  The achari (? – with lime and possibly mango) was very good as well.  After a couple of popadums (good hot tomato and lime relishes) and washed down with a Cobra, the meal improved our mood somewhat.

Eventually I made it back from Hitchin to Cambridge, just in time for MoTD2.  I have to say that as we pulled in, the driver told passengers that they could claim a refund.  So a hesitant bronze star to FCC for that.  My point is that since I never completed my journey, I should logically receive a full refund + expenses (curry) + compensation for my time (5 hours!).  I bet I’ll be lucky to get the fare back.  Watch this space!

Here’s my vision.  Now that most tickets are paid for by credit card, and cards go through machines, it is becoming possible to track passengers through the system.  At least some refunds could be made automatically.  I guess there are privacy issues, so maybe people would have to register for their credit card details to be retained for the purpose of any refund, but we shouldn’t have to fill out forms to get our money back, it should just be credited to the account we paid for the ticket in the first place.  With Oyster-type smart-card arrangements this becomes even more practical.

Recommendation 3: Rail franchisees (and other transport operators such as airlines) should be required to provide a mechanism for automatically refunding fares for delays by (say) 2012.

I guess that’s enough for now.  As I said there are so many faults with the railways that you could write an essay about each journey…

…shafted!

Each journey on the UK’s railways is more surreal than the last. This weekend I visited Newcastle by rail.

Anyone not familiar with present ticketing policies on the rail network will be astonished to learn that in order to buy a rail ticket comparable in price to easyJet – yes, to flying, that great evil in this age of global warming – it’s necessary to book several weeks beforehand. And even then, unless you are prepared to have the National Express website ready in a browser – on a fast internet connection, of course – and your fingers poised over the keyboard, ready for the moment the tickets for a particular date are released, you will find that the cheap fares are only available at odd times of day.

So I found myself waiting on platform 1 at Cambridge station for an 06:27 train last Friday morning in order to intercept the East Coast main-line train to Newcastle at Stevenage at 07:50 (OK, I could have caught the 06:57 but this wasn’t scheduled to reach Stevenage until 07:43 and experience tells me not to trust the operators quite that much).

What struck me was that Cambridge station was not teeming with commuters at the crack of dawn, and the 06:27 to King’s Cross via Stevenage was only a 4 carriage train and was practically empty until Stevenage, although a reasonable number of people boarded there.

Here’s some context. I quote some data that arrived via the cam.transport Yahoo! newsgroup:

“The Cambridge/KX line now has four of the six most overcrowded trains:

07:15 Cambridge London Kings Cross 176%
08:02 Woking London Waterloo 176%
07:45 Cambridge London Kings Cross 164%
17:45 London Kings Cross Kings Lynn 164%
08.22 Oxford London Paddington 159%
18:15 London Kings Cross Ely 154%”

See the DfT source document (pdf) for a little more detail.

Note particularly that the 07:15 and 07:45 trains will still be above capacity when they eventually complete plans to lengthen platforms and allow 12 rather than 8 carriage trains on the Cambridge line. This will increase capacity by 50% but these two trains are already running at 76% and 64% over capacity respectively!

It is also worth bearing in mind that the rush hour is what it says on the tin. I understand that passenger arrivals at King’s Cross (and other London termini) peak sharply between 8am and 9am.

Now, as a non-commuter I rarely travel to London on trains departing Cambridge before 10am, because that’s the earliest time at which I can use both a discount railcard (I have a Network Card which can be used from 10am) and “Saver” tickets (these are valid from 09:30, I believe).

This is insane.

I should point out that I was only catching the 06:27 to Stevenage last Friday because the price of the train towards London was included in the Cambridge to Newcastle fare. A few weeks ago I went to Birmingham for the day. I bought the cheapest outbound route available when I booked and found myself travelling on the 07:45 to King’s Cross, walking to Euston (my ticket would have paid for the tube, but who tubes that journey?) and taking the Virgin Express to Birmingham New Street, all for £14.50. That is, I was able to travel on one of the country’s busiest trains, and get a trip from London to Brum in the deal, for less than the cheapest single I could have bought to London at that time of day! As I said, surreal!

What I simply do not understand is why commuters are not given an added incentive to arrive in London before 8am (or after 9am, but it’s early travelling I want to talk about today). Why don’t “they” (for example) simply change the ticketing rules so that Saver tickets and/or railcards can be used on services arriving in London before 8am?

What’s more, ticket restrictions have recently been introduced in the afternoon as well. You can’t use Savers and railcards on trains to Cambridge (and many other destinations) departing King’s Cross between 16:30 and 19:00. For occasional rail travellers like me this is a huge inconvenience. The penalty for finding yourself at King’s Cross at the wrong time is either an additional fare of £17.90 or a wait of up to 2 and a 1/2 hours. For practical purposes I have to arrange journeys via London – such as on the Eurostar – around this restriction.

My point is that if commuters were given an added incentive to head to work earlier then they would naturally be able to leave earlier, stretching out the afternoon peak. Ticket restrictions might then be unnecessary in the afternoon, too.

It gets worse.

It just happens that on the way back from Newcastle on Monday I got chatting with an Argentinian family visiting the UK for the first time. They were on a flying visit to Cambridge before catching the Eurostar at (as I recollect) 07:30 the next morning. They therefore wanted to catch (probably) the 05:45 from Cambridge arriving King’s Cross at 06:35. I was too embarrassed to offer to help them buy a ticket. Even though the 05:45 would be practically empty, the journey was going to cost them £17.90 for each adult – probably more than their nights accommodation in Cambridge, courtesy of the YHA . OK, without a railcard and because of the perversity of a single costing nearly as much as a day return, they would only have been able to get the price down to £14.00 for a Saver. With a Network, Student or Senior railcard, though, a local would be able to save an additional third on that (actually only £11.80 according to the appalling UK national rail enquiries website) were the restriction on use before 8am lifted. And the cost would reduce even more for a return fare.

The policy objective is to get people to use the trains rather than fly. This weekend, travelling to Newcastle, I arrived by 11am on Friday and was back in Cambridge by 12am on Monday (despite various minor delays). If you travel early it doesn’t destroy the day. But when I choose to travel to the Continent I don’t have the option to travel early on the Eurostar. Because of the cost of travel to London, the price advantage of flying from Stansted is huge, for any (flight or Eurostar) departure before about midday.

It gets even worse.

You can’t even get a service from Cambridge to King’s Cross in time to catch the 06:30 or 05:25 Eurostar services to Paris (leaving 5 minutes walk away, from St Pancras), and even the 06:55 would be borderline. The earliest fast train from Cambridge to King’s Cross is the 05:45 arriving 06:35. You’d therefore have to hope the tediously slow 04:48 arrives on time at 06:21. And run.

Writing about rail travel in the UK is extremely difficult because there are so many shortcomings it’s too easy to get side-tracked (for example, I just logged a complaint about the enquiry website being slowed down to a ridiculous extent by ads – compare the Dutch equivalent!). As they say on motivational training courses, there are no problems, just opportunities! In that vein, there are so many opportunities to encourage people to travel by rail rather than air, as well as to improve the customer experience, whilst reducing fares by exploiting economies of scale, that it’s a crying shame the organisation – and government – is like a rabbit frozen in the headlights of an express.

Simply easing the ticket restrictions before the morning rush hour (and perhaps increasing capacity then) would relieve congestion on later commuter trains, increase leisure use of the railways and encourage a modal shift from air to rail for longer journeys.

I was going to say that encouraging travel from Cambridge before the rush hour would be a simpler solution than lengthening platforms to take 12-carriage trains. But, from the loading figures, it now seems the situation has been allowed to deteriorate so much that both measures are required. Yesterday. In a sane world these measures would have been taken already and I’d be discussing the obstacles to doubling the frequency of the service from every 30 minutes, as at present, to every 15.

A tad belatedly, the UK recently completed its high-speed rail link to the Channel tunnel – the French had theirs ready in 1994 when the tunnel opened, of course. Ours cost £5.8 billion and cuts “journey times to Paris by 20 minutes to two hours and 15 minutes and to Brussels by 25 minutes to one hour and 51 minutes”, according to the BBC. Here’s a plan to save a third of those numbers of minutes (why the saving on trains to/from Paris is less than to/from Brussels is beyond me, since the track in question is common to both routes – arcane timetabling issues presumably come into it).

Yesterday afternoon I was told the train from Brussels would get me to St Pancras at 13:03. It didn’t. This might sound like one of those conundrums in the paper, but, as far as I could tell, on this occasion the service ran bang on time. The train to Cambridge left King’s Cross at 13:15 on the dot. I know – I was running for it. King’s Cross is next door to St P and, even more favourably, the first platform you come to is number 8, where the Cambridge train left from. It’s 3 minute walk, tops. To say I (rather then the train) will arrive at “St Pancras” or worse “King’s Cross/St Pancras” at 13:03 is spin to the point of lying.

What happened to the other 9 minutes? Let’s be reasonable and just try to save 5 of them. Even if this cost us, say £160 million, the saving would be worth a net £1 billion at the rate of the high-speed link (if £5.8 billion saves 25 minutes, then to find the cost of saving 5 minutes we divide by 5 and get £1.16 billion).

First, it can take several minutes just to escape the carriage. These things were not designed by the iPod team, I can tell you. Let’s put to one side the arm-rests on the seats – clearly the carriage requirement specification did not include any provision for people to actually move around the train. The arm-rests are carefully positioned to manage to catch the average adult in the upper thigh or worse. But, although avoiding catching the arm-rests with your leg generally only results in one on the other side of the aisle tripping up the suitcase you are wheeling, the arm-rests are a problem mainly when the train is moving, and not the limiting factor when queuing in the aisle to get off.

No, what I noticed while standing in the aisle swearing yesterday was that there are doors at one end of the carriage only. 80 people, many with large items of luggage, trying to go through one small exit. Now, I presume train doors are expensive, but I suggest a false economy has been made. It clearly never occurred to anyone that these trains are point to point. (Or maybe it did, and they don’t care). (Practically) everyone gets on at Brussels (also a tedious process) and everyone gets off at St Pancras. They don’t drop off a few passengers at every station. I recollect that the previous train I caught, from den Haag to Brussels, did have rather more door provision, even though at most stations only a few people got on or off.

So, the whole point of investing £5.8bn in this train service was to shade a few minutes off the journey time to compete with air travel, yet a design decision has been made which adds several minutes to the average journey time. But I’m not finished yet. The whole problem is compounded by the luggage pantomime. For the benefit of anyone who hasn’t used the Eurostar service, although even medium-sized suitcases fit above the seats, racks have helpfully been provided for large items of luggage next to the door. Not quite enough racks, though, mind – suitcases blocking the aisle and exit are a regular problem. Yesterday I watched in horrified fascination as those lucky enough to be leaving the train each held up dozens of other people as they slowly collected their heavy bags. Often they had to move other people’s bags first.

Clearly the luggage pantomime would take half the time if there were an exit at each end of the carriage, but there may be other options. Large bags could be checked. People could – like on the trans-Canadian – collect them on the platform. A luggage carriage would be a more efficient way of providing the space used for luggage racks throughout the train, since in general some will be full (or overflowing) and some less than full. The luggage carriage could be the first on the train (where it might also provide a crumple-zone if they ever crash the thing!), since that’s the way you have to exit both in Brussels and London (though a problem to solve is that the luggage carriage would then be at the back on the return journey).

This brings us neatly to the second problem. When you finally manage to get off the train you find yourself on a narrow, crowded platform, full of hundreds of people, many wheeling large suitcases. This is where a few more minutes go. Remember, the £5.8 billion investment implies that each minute is worth about £200 million. The problem I’ve already alluded to is that you have to walk to the front of the train – I’d guess something approaching 400m from carriage 17 where I was. And when you finally get to the front of the train, you simply go down to another station level on an escalator (after queuing for it, of course). Although fairly cluttered – for some reason a shopping mall has been included in St Pancras – this other level is the main station service level, where you find the ticket office and, in my case the passage leading to the road where (I kid you not) you have to dodge taxis in order to cross to the King’s Cross part of Europe’s busiest (non-airport?) transport interchange.

Particularly frustrating if you’re in a hurry is that the Eurostar platform has entrances along it, but no other exits. This is simply poor station design. Though it may also have something to do with the obsession with “illegal immigration” – despite French and UK border checks at Brussels, you get to walk past a UK passport checkpoint. Although the booths are unstaffed, you get stared at by several “spotters” as I think they are termed – they could be immigration, police or a bunch of guys having a laugh, for all you can tell. (What a welcome! Couldn’t these guys be hidden behind screens, or watching us on CCTV?). Presumably, this checkpoint is deemed necessary, but it could nevertheless be duplicated at least once. Even if there was only one more checkpoint bottleneck at the rear of the train, further exits could be provided along the platform to move people to more space on the lower level. And how much value was put on each metre of width of the platform? Since a few metres more width would allow the crowd to move much faster – and a minute is worth £200 million, remember – the value of a platform-metre should have been tens of millions of pounds. I bet it wasn’t. Or rather I bet no-one even did this calculation.

So, to save a billion pounds – or rather £1.16 billion pounds worth of time for £160 million investment – I suggest we spend a few million on experiments on alternative carriage designs with doors at each end so that people can exit a bit more quickly. Implementaion will have to wait until the fleet is renewed, though. More practical would be to spend the rest of the money on (1) additional exits from St Pancras (and Brussels) so that people can get away from the train more quickly coupled with (2) carriages for the storage of large items of luggage at either end of the train.

As someone who once started a blog purely to report on the state of UK public transport, I know to stop here. The problem is that there are so many issues that I could write a tome after every journey, since passenger interests are barely taken into account, which is surely what government should be doing.

Next time I’ll tell you how to save tens of billions of pounds. Or, to put it another way, improve the service with no engineering at all so that I for one would never consider taking the plane to large areas of Europe.