damerell | Railway costs redux

A Cambridge-York return, right now, will cost you 70 quid, with the inconvenience of shivering on Peterborough station for 20 minutes or so.

Clare and I are going to York and back on the 10th December. We won't have to shiver on Peterborough station. We are not paying 70 quid; we are paying a tenner more... which appears to cover the costs of operating 60019 Bittern, a highly labour-intensive piece of machinery which will be a week off its 74th birthday and requires special pathing because it is limited to 75mph, and a rake of coaches which will likely be pushing 50 years old.

So what are the TOCs doing with that 70 quid, throwing money parties?

[Yes, some people on the normal journey will be on lower advance fares. Some will also be on singles at 69 quid each! And, get this, the first class fare on National Rail? £203. On the steam service? £119. On the steam service with full English breakfast, lunch, and four course dinner? £189 - 14 quid _less_. If you routinely travel first class you can _save money_ by going on steam expeditions.]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

This makes no sense... Unless occasional slots for 'specials' at weekends are ridiculously cheap, and regular timetable slots are eye-wateringly expensive.

Alternatively, it's a case of "No good reason doesn't mean no reason, it means a bad reason"... Which, in this situation, implies inefficiency and price-gouging.

Or, of course, bad data. Good luck finding out the aggregate *effective* fare on any British passenger rail service, and an accurate arithmetic mean, median and mode. Or the actual costs of running a train. Everybody interested in the numbers, who has the resources to get the numbers, has an interest in distorting or concealing the numbers.

I recall that the downfall of the centrally-planned economies was due to systematic misreporting of each and every work unit's contribution to the Five Year Plan: I relish the irony of hearing the old British Rail referred to as 'Soviet-Era' when they published reliable accounts and costings, when their free-market successors - and their regulators! - have the accounting and reporting skills of Comrade Party Secretary in a Tractor Factory Workers' Co-operative.

Good luck indeed - unless it's a steam service, where this data is reasonably readily available, most locomotive owners being cooperative enthusiasts. I suspect if I skimmed through old _Steam Railway_ issues I could find a number of estimates for the total costs of running such an excursion and the components thereof - indeed, off the top of my head, I know the usual rule of thumb is that "the profit is in the last coach" - and if I want to know the effective fare I can probably just ask the guard how many pax are in each category. :-)

As I understand it, pathings for one-off trains are contingent on the rest of the timetable working more-or-less as expected, and such trains can expect to be shuffled out of the way for an hour or two if the signaller needs to make the rest of the timetable start working.

More generally, there's a difference in the way franchised and non-franchised users of the network are charged for track access, which means franchised operators pay more for track access. (They get some perks in exchange for this which make longer-term planning easier.)

(S)

Railway costs redux

But did the train run on time?

Re: But did the train run on time?

Re: But did the train run on time?