Last night for reasons to spurious to mention I decided that I may find myself in a situation a week on Monday where I may be stranded in Newcastle without a car to drive back to Leeds in, a genuine situation, I haven't made it up, and conversley if that happens then I will need to get back to Newcastle without a car on the following Friday.
And I thought about trains, I have thoughts of great genius like that sometimes.
Now you have to bear in mind at the start of this story that the last time I caught a train between two cities (what used to be called "inter-city") was 29 years ago, seriously, and since then I've only ever caught two other local trains and someone else organised those for me, its pathetic really isn't it ?
So I looked on this t'interweb thingy and quickly discovered that the two operators at the top of the google listing didn't really want to tell me about their core business, that is they run trains between cities but they'd really like to keep it all a big secret if you don't mind.
GNER was the first that I tried, entered their web site, all was fine, typed in the date of my first journey and the approximate time (2pm) and they quickly told me that they had two trains departing for Leeds within five minutes of each other, which one would I like, oh and by the way would I like to hire a car too ?
I ignored the car hire advert as I couldn't possibly think of a reason why I should want to hire a car whilst booking a train journey, its a bit like McDonalds asking you if you'd like a Burger King instead, so I ignored that and clicked the buttons that said "get prices".
It then asked me to register with GNER with my email address and a secret password.
I didn't want to register with them, I just wanted to know how much the train journey would cost me, I verbally abused the screen and went back to google and chose the second operator, Virgin Trains, Richard Branson wouldn't let me down would he ?
Well actually , yes he would, his web site also wanted me to register with them before disclosing their prices.
I was beginning to feel a bit left out by now, what was it about me that made them want to know stuff before they'd tell me their prices ? It doesn't happen at supermarkets, when I pick up a cabbage I don't have to register with Asda before they'll tell me how much it is, I just wanted to know how much a normal train fare was from Newcastle to Leeds without having to sign the official secrets act - but they didn't trust me enough.
After asking around on a few internet forums I finally found a web site that promised to tell me the innermost secrets of the train operators - their prices. The web site was so obscure that I can't remember what it was called now, but sure enough when I types in all the details it came back with a timetable and .... prices.
On the train that I wanted to catch and ont he two days that I wanted to travel, they had eight different ticket options ranging from £11 return to £80 return, all on the same train, none in first class, nothing special like a three course meal served to my seat by livered employees, just a bog standard ticket, eight options with a £69 price differential and they all had different names with different explanations as to why they should have different prices, the bottom line is that you could have eight people sitting in the same railway carriage and they'd all have paid a different price for the same journey at the same time, and the one who paid £80 would be mightily pissed off with himself.
So here is my suggestion for the train operators.
Have one price for each journey.
Charge a bit more at peak times if you want to, but define what those times are.
Charge a bit more if the train is quicker or direct and doesn't involve changes at other stations.
But at the very least make sure that everyone on the same train is paying the same price.
And then don't keep your prices a big secret, I could have found the formula for processing nuclear grade uranium quicker last night then I did the price of a seat on the Newcastle/Leeds 13.57 on 1st May.
Its supposed to be a public service after all.
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It seems to me that as a business they would want to make it easier on you in order to ensure you would want to do business with them. And while they are performing a public service it is a business. I'll never understand why they (and by they I mean the evil corporations of the world) make things so hard and secretive on us.
It gets worse.
I've been speaking to regular users of the rail network in the last cuople of days and they've told me crazy stories of return tickets being cheaper than single tickets, tickets being much cheaper for a length of the country journey if you're prepared to buy five single tickets and break your journey at five seperate stations, loads and loads of stupid stories that convince me that they don't really want us to use the rail network - suits me, I'll stick to my car.
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