If you live in Newquay, Cornwall, and want to visit your old mum, who happens to live in the Scottish fishing village of Kyle of Lochalsh, and decide to travel first class by train, you will pay a whopping £1,002 for your return ticket. For the first time ever, a journey on Britain’s railways costs in excess of a grand. What is worse, the trains on the first and last legs of the journey don’t even have first-class carriages.
Regular railway travellers will certainly have noticed significant increases in fares. A friend of mine was recently astonished to see a traveller from Crewe stumping up £316 for a return ticket to London.
How can the railways justify these eye-watering fares? We have now arrived at the point where a return journey from one end of our small country to the other costs more than a round-the-world air ticket (£755), a ride on the Trans-Siberian railway from Moscow to Beijing (£995) or a trip on the Orient Express from London to Zurich, fine dining included (£1,000).
The railways have been successful in wooing increasing numbers off the roads and onto their trains. If, however, the current upward spiral in prices continues, we may soon see even more cars cluttering our already choked motorways.
