No updates on here for a while, but that’s not to say the service has been markedly improved. Admittedly it’s not usually as bad in the summer as the winter, but we’ve still had our fair share of delays. It’s surprising how often it happens on a Monday morning or, as we’ve just had a couple of bank holidays, Tuesdays. Always the first day back.

For a change, today is Thursday and I’m writing this on the delayed 09h02, which eventually arrived at 09h14. Signal failure, apparently.

Tuesday night was a delay-filled disaster, too. Admittedly not the train company’s fault as it was caused by a fatality at Ingatestone, but it still makes for a pretty miserable journey home.

Add to that the fact that my ticket stopped working when it got wiped by one of the barriers – at least a once or twice a year occurrence that means you have to queue for another – and commuting really isn’t a pleasant experience.

So the saga of our advanced tickets has finally drawn to a close. The reason we could get tickets but not seats on the train we wanted was that the booking system had apparently broken down. I’m not sure I entirely believe that as I’m sure it gave me the option of seats on earlier trains.

Anyhow, we’re now booked onto a Thursday night train to Darlington, with seats, but not at the price we would have liked. Admittedly the £50 each singles we bought are a lot cheaper than anything we could have bought closer to the date, but when we were originally offered £13.50 fares they still feel quite steep.

The worst bit of it is that the guy at the office who sold us the tickets said that there were no £13.50 tickets at all. He said they had been withdrawn before they’d even gone on sale because they knew it was going to be a popular day to travel. That smacks of the worst kind of profiteering. Surely if there is one price for advance tickets it should stand, regardless of the number of people who _might_ book to travel. Removing them before they go on sale means removing them before you even know what the demand might be.

Which begs another question. If the system was happy to sell us £13.50 tickets last week, but not reserve the seats to go with them, were they actually on sale after all, despite what the guy at the ticket office might say? And was the reservations ‘error’ actually caused by us booking them while the train operator was whipping them out of the system to maximise its profits?

The saga continues. We’ve been trying to buy tickets to get to Darlington for Easter. Not difficult, you wouldn’t think. After all, it’s still months away, and the train operators like you to buy early. That’s why they give you a discount.

Well, after weeks of it looking like it was going to cost £200 to get there and another £200 to get back the northbound prices have finally dropped to £13.50. Much more reasonable.

Except that when you come to book them you get the error below. You can have a ticket, but you can’t have a seat. How crap is that? It’s close to a three-hour journey, and that’ll be the busiest night of the year apart from Christmas, so there’s no way we can stand.

The rail networks in this country are a farce. Complete and utter.

So the earlier you book, the cheaper it is, eh? Not on today’s evidence.

We want some tickets to Darlington three months from today, so we marked the calendar to book them right now, the first day they went on sale. And you know what the price for just getting there is? £199 for the two of us.

£199!

Pay the same on the way back and it’ll be a £400 round trip. Except, of course, we won’t. You could buy a second-hand car and enough petrol to get there and back for that. Or less.

You could fly.

I’ll give them a call and see if they can find us something cheaper, but £400 for a couple of two and a half hour trips _won’t_ be on the cards.

(Delays on the 08h58 again this morning. And the 09h02 that I caught.)

On the day that rail prices have risen by an average of 6%, train operators look set to reap even higher revenues by confusing vulnerable passengers.

SouthWest Trains is leading a drive to close many of the network’s ticket offices, either permanently or at off-peak times, giving passengers no choice but to buy their tickets from machines.

This is a problem, as machines can’t sell you a ticket from the boundary of your season ticket to another station, and often offer you a peak-rate ticket outside of peak hours. For anyone who doesn’t know when peak and off-peak apply, this could be confusing – particularly as not all train operators have the same off-peak hours.

As The Times puts it:

The Government is preparing to approve the closures, despite receiving evidence from the passenger watchdog that people find machines confusing and prefer speaking to ticket clerks for advice on the cheapest option.

Clerks are legally obliged to offer impartial advice whereas machines simply display long lists of ticket options without explaining which is the most suitable. Passengers who fear being fined for having the wrong ticket may feel compelled to buy a more expensive ticket without realising that cheaper options are valid.

This may be a cost-cutter for the rail companies, but it’ll be a cost-hiker for the passenger, meaning the operators win twice over. Not only are their outgoings lower; their income will be higher, too.

My poor season ticket. It runs out at the end of the year, and as today is my last day at work I’ve been holding off getting a free replacement.

This happens every year. The cardboard tickets they dole out don’t have the stamina to be taken out of a wallet six times a day (into the barriers at my local station, out again when I arrive at London, into the barriers on the tube and out then out again when I arrive at work before doing the whole thing again in reverse.

By about May it’s already worn out and needs replacing, and I’m lucky if I can get the replacement to run through what remains of the year.

So for the last couple of weeks I’ve been grovelling at the manual gates for the staff to let me through, and this morning I got a friendly, knowing smile from the guy letting me onto the tube.

‘My ticket is…,’ I started, but he laughed, swung open the door and said ‘yes, yes’.

He’d heard it all before.

Roll on proper Oyster cards for national rail.

Chiltern Railways is rolling out a new phone-based paperless ticketing system. Initially testing with 50 passengers, the company plans to roll it out across its whole network in two months’ time, before possible nationwide use.

The system, where tickets are bought by mobile phone, should cut queues at ticket offices. Once purchased, travel details are displayed on the phone’s screen, to be scanned at the barrier or shown to an on-train inspector.

A spokeswoman talking to London Lite described the scheme as ‘completely secure’.

The total amount paid in fares by rail passengers has doubled since privatisation to more than £5 billion a year. But the total subsidy has risen even faster, reaching £6.3 billion last year, four times what British Rail received in a typical year. (Source: The Times)

If there were every any figures to damn the whole idea of rail privatisation, it must be these. Perhaps that’s why the government wants to see prices climb still higher: ‘the higher the prices, the lower the subsidy’ seems to be the theory, but the simultaneous hikes detailed above do little to support it.

Without clear information on the cause of these spiralling costs, we can only put them down to inefficiencies, for while the network is carrying 150% of the number of passengers British Rail once did, it is costs three times as much to get them anywhere. That can’t be right.

So while the government currently caps the rises on season tickets and cheap-rate fares, it looks set to dismiss calls for the practice to be extended into the future, which could lead to increases of up to 30% for season ticket holders on some routes. That would price many passengers out of their jobs, unless they were to move closer to work, or work from home.

The government’s argument?

‘The reality is that 6% of the population travels on railways. So why should people who don’t use railways regularly fund the people who do?’

Perhaps because it’s because of this lack of proper funding that only 6% of people use the railways in the first place. Give them the subsidised funding they require, reduce ticket prices, increase capacity and build news lines, and passenger numbers will rise, particularly off-peak.

Sometimes you have to wonder whether the government’s green commitments are little more than hyperbole.