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 He said they had been withdrawn before they’d even gone on sale because they knew it was going to be a popular day to travel.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?