£100 a month? It’s £200 return for a day for Bristol to London - and that’s if the train gets you there, and doesn’t dump you somewhere outside of Chippenham because it’s the wrong kind of sunny today and the rails have buckled, or it’s cold and the rails have frozen, or it’s raining and the train is poorly with diesel cholera. All of these are acts of god, of course, so aren’t compensatable events.
The last time I had to travel from London to Bristol and back, I rented a car from Heathrow airport and it cost me a quarter of the price the train would. It takes the same amount of time, but the car is more comfortable and worse for the environment. The system is so broken in the UK.
Problem is that there is massive pent up demand. Cheaper tickets mean more people travelling longer distances to work when there isn't capacity. The last thing we need is even more regular commuting to London from outside greater London.
This demand is caused by high house prices and lack of opportunities outside of the SE. Trains are a sticky plaster that gives lots of subsidy to middle class commuters whilst local bus services are cut. Distance is also environmentally problematic regardless of mode of transport.
Something like 160 pounds at peak time from Nottingham to London. Service is good but it's just inconceivable that private individuals would be paying that, all the travelers are on expenses or are self employed contractors/consultants. When I started working and up till about 2005 the same journey was about 40 pounds - a massive increase!
This one,albeit sounding funny,is a pretty serious issue: leaves get crushed under the weight of a train and eventually form a teflon like film on the tracks, which makes it very slippery. Not an expert in this area,so no idea how it's dealt with in various countries.
My favourite is: the carriage is deflated. People couldn't stop laughing when told so, but what it meant in reality is that the support cushions deflated and the carriage can't have passengers on board.
And there’s the rub. Is that network rail’s problem, or the operator’s? Network rails’s rails... operator’s train wheels, leaves in the middle. The leaves are undefined, and are therefore probably nobody’s problem but the passengers’.
