Alongside the timetable, the tickets that passengers buy represent the core ‘product’ that the railways offer. There is no doubt that great things have been done to speed up journeys and improve the service offered on many routes - making train travel so much more attractive to so many more people.
However, it is arguable that even bigger factors in driving the record growth in the numbers of passengers using inter-city trains have been the changes made to the types of tickets that are on sale, and the ways that passengers can buy these tickets.
Just look where we have come from. Back in the day, you bought your ticket over a counter on the day you travelled. What you got was a piece of paper. Your ticket generally came in two sizes - big one for inter-city and a smaller one for suburban. Fares also came in two sizes - big for peak, smaller for off-peak. Pretty much a colour version of the monochrome Victorian system.
Today, we have tickets and fares seemingly tailor-made for each individual passenger. And you can buy by phone, on the internet, a ticket vending machine, an App, or even from a person! Your ticket might be ‘old school’ orange, a barcode on your smartphone, a chip in your bankcard, a wireless signal from your smartphone, or you might have printed it yourself.
With all this choice, the average fare actually paid by passengers has fallen and the number of inter-city passengers has rocketed, as we see the synergy between the Advance Purchase inter-city rail ticket and the burgeoning budget hotel industry.
So the rail industry is right to work hard to develop new tickets, fares and ways of buying that work for passengers. But with all this innovation, variety and choice has come complexity. This is not in itself a new challenge - I remember British Rail’s ‘Blue Days’ and ‘White Days’ - but today’s complexity has taken things to another level. So as well as innovating to deliver more of what passengers want, the rail industry needs to work just as hard to remove the confusion and concern that this complexity can cause passengers.
As Paul highlights, this is going to be hard work. With fares and tickets, the rail industry is great at adding new things on top of what went before. Sometimes ‘backwards compatibility’ is a good thing, but here it seems to have created a whole swathe of inconsistencies and anomalies which can probably only be fixed by a top to bottom restructuring. However, any such restructuring will need to be done with a firm eye on the passenger, to ensure that the changes are fair and their consequences understood by passengers and funders.
The rail industry will need to work in partnership here, as so much of the inherited structure is baked into the way that train operators work with Government, but a way needs to be found to make it all work for all types of train services and the wide range of passenger needs. And making things work is something the rail industry is good at - we have the ideas and we know the issues, we understand our passengers’ needs, and we can act once there is clarity as to where we are heading.
The pilots are therefore hugely welcome, and cover the wide range of challenges that we will all face. And it is great to see new players involved in these innovations - it is so hard to get up to speed in this game, but new ideas are needed. Now would be a good time to be bold and unlock the great opportunities that are hidden here, and not let this be another false start.
