This is a story that everyone in the UK knows

I live in Gloucestershire, UK, not far from a town called Stonehouse. I want to visit York in a few weeks time and I would love to travel by train. It is a little bit inconvenient to get to my local station but manageable. I am visiting the National Railway Museum in York, which is very close to York station.

In the car it is around 200 miles and probably similar on the train.

However, I won’t travel by train and here’s why:

Cost

Cheapest return ticket on the train = £128 which is more than the average gross daily salary of someone in the UK. If I want to travel early enough to make the day trip worthwhile, I can instead pay £270 return. Yes, 2 days worth of gross salary for a 200 mile train trip. On top of this, I might need to pay for a cab to the station or a car park ticket if I drive there.

If I drive all the way to York in my diesel car, it will cost around £27 in diesel. I can travel whenever I want, stop whenever I want and in addition will have to pay to park in York for the day.

Yes, to travel on a shared mode of public transport, to an inconvenient timetable, it will cost somewhere between 5 and 10 times as much as driving in what used to be considered an extreme luxury - a private car.

The time

The difference in time is not so bad and will be affected by unknowns like accidents or train service issues but the quickest time is about the same driving or on the train, despite the fact that I am only allowed to travel at 70 miles per hour and the train can go up to 125. If I add on the time that I waste travelling to the station and waiting, it would probably be another 20 minutes, by which point, I would already be 20 miles up the road in the car.

However, because I have to change trains, the variation in times is quite severe, anything from 3hr 40m to 4hr 40m and some random offerings like having the first leg in the evening and the second the following morning = 9 hours. Yeah…No!

The problem

It’s a simple problem of economics. Originally, public transport was supposed to make use of an economy of scale. If you can move 500 people in one train, the cost per-passenger should be quite low. However, somewhere along the line, this has not been true. It is partly explained by the fact that most road maintenance comes out of tax payers money, although so does some railway expenditure and the RAC once said that drivers contribute more in road tax than is spent on the roads so it must be something else.

I wrote to my previous MP about this with the simple conclusion, “if you cannot work out why the per-passenger cost is so high, our railways are dommed”. The response was along the lines of “I know railways are expensive, it’s really annoying”. If the economics cannot be seriously considered, we will continue to somehow pretend that most people can afford to travel by train and shouldn’t be using our cars. If we did understand it, maybe we would realise there is more money to be made by making train travel more exclusive: offering more first class lounges, ensuring only first-class ticket holders travel in first-class. Offering other incentives like the airlines do, then you can charge a premium to hide whatever is causing this crazy cost.

I won’t hold my breath though.