How I got 100% off my train travel

Though the problem is that delayed trains are often overcrowded trains. And overcrowded trains are not conducive for doing work on a laptop, unless you like sitting on the vestibule floor outside the toilet door with your laptop on your knees.

Agreed, but also where did those %'s come from? Seems like thin air so it's really all a gamble at this point.

For probabilities (much) smaller than 10%, sure.

But adding 10%, 20%, and 35%, is already a pretty bad start. The error rate becomes huge. (in the article example, the 10% estimate of chances of being on time is ~3.5 smaller than the actual 35% correct result).

Being wrong by half an order of magnitude, is being quite wrong :)

I was once over 90 minutes late on a TGV. Naturally, SNCF reported a delay of 59 minutes when calculating my rebate...

Automatic Delay Repay depends on your train company and which company you used to buy the ticket.

What is a late slip?

So 80% of journeys have a 50% refund?

I believe that’s the level EU requires for long distance trains.

I think by and large this doesn’t play out with trains. American trains tend to be much less frequent, slower, and less comfortable than most European trains.

I road a swiss train a couple years ago that was something like 5 minutes late. To me (American) it was “on time” but the conductor came on the PA and apologized. He did make a point to clarify the delay was because they’d been stuck behind an off schedule German train.

FWIW Amtrak's policy is 15 minutes, but they're not known for being on time:

https://www.amtrak.com/on-time-performance

It's interesting how much effort here is dedicated to explaining that it's the freight rail companies' fault.

Japan would like to have a word.

And "short-term cost, long-term benefit" is kryptonite to the average politician. "We get the blame, the next guy takes the credit"

There is some low hanging fruit, like the ticketing system.

Might be possible to improve satisfaction without costly infrastructure upgrades by ensuring you have a seat for long trips and being more aggressive with discounts at quiet times.

Plenty of times I’ve been one of like 30 people on a 12 car train despite the ticket having cost £60. The train is going to run anyway, so may as well price more aggressively.

That's why we focus on the important stuff like spending several million to call lines suffragette and lionness.

> Anything that will improve the situation will be expensive and/or take a long time to achieve

Only if you do it properly.

I mean there’s pretty low hanging fruit mentioned in the article. If rail strikes are frequent enough to feature in the formula, end the strikes by paying the workers well.

Low bar? British people tend to compare with rail travel experienced on holidays in places like France. Those systems do seem to be better (I do not have recent experience myself) and this then feeds the usual British tendency to take a rosy tinted view of the rest of the world and pessimism about the UK.

It also varies a lot in different places. Costs vary with types of tickets, who you are, and whether you have various discounts.

Local train services are very weak where I live (Cheshire) so while I can get to major cities quite easily its difficult to travel between towns in the county on trains (or buses).

I’m an American who lived in London for 3 years and was also impressed, but as someone who only had to use national rail for leisure (got around London by bus/tube) I was oblivious to two things:

1) Commute hours are brutal. Trains are packed and even a few minutes delay can feel like ages when you’re missing a meeting.

2) The cost of 5x weekly round trips is enormous. The average annual pass for someone commuting into London from outside is like £4000. That’s in a country where the average wage is around £40,000. That’s a huge amount of money to spend on public transportation. I know a car would be more but I’ve never met a single American who spends that fraction of their income on public transportation.

Still though … I’d rather have expensive and unreliable trains than no trains at all.

If you travel in and around the South East, inc. London the service is pretty good, regular although still very very expensive.

In the north though it’s a mixed bag, frequently delayed, huge underinvestment, expensive etc.

I often travel intercity to London and a ticket travelling out early, say, Monday and returning after peak hours, say, Wednesday costs upwards of £75. I have to book well in advance to get this price. I have just priced such a journey and the cheapest I can get for the days I chose next week is £105, for example. The journey time is about 2:20 but often it takes 10 minutes longer.

Quite often (maybe 1 in 6) my train to London would get cancelled. I would be able to get a refund no problem, but there is no compensation for the fact I have driven to the station and am now stuck without any travel plans.

Conversely I would have to arrive at the station early, for if I missed my train I would forfeit that half of the ticket and would have to pay again to travel on the later train. As such my journey would actually also include an extra 15 minutes of slack time in case the car didn't start and I needed to wake the wife for a lift, for example. It would also be quite stressful on the way home, where a meeting might overrun, putting my chances of getting my booked train at risk.

A year or two ago they opened a new "parkway" railway station (basically park-and-ride) and now the earliest train no longer stops at my local station. It would take me 30 minutes to drive to the parkway station, plus cost me £6 a day parking there, so my only option now is the later train which arrives in London at 8:30, if it is on time, making it impossible for me to start work before 9am.

The trains are supposed to have eight carriages, of which one is first class. On the outward journey I could often get a seat but the return journey would be standing only for the first hour. Quite often the train would arrive with only five carriages meaning it would be absolutely rammed the whole way. This leaves you very exhausted and sweaty for the start of the work day. And forget first class: it is twice the price of standard class.

So I've given up with the long distance train and now drive down to a commuter town near London and get the train just the final bit. I can also get into London much earlier and I don't have to pre-book specific trains. It's actually cheaper too, with the fuel and train tickets coming in at about £65, though obviously there's car depreciation, tyres, &c. on top.

So between £75-£130 for a prebooked ticket on an inflexible, specifically timed, intercity train, with a total journey time of about 3:00, or £65 for a drive down in my own car whatever times I want with a total journey time of about 3:30.

I'm surprised nobody has mentioned Japan. Wait till you try the trains there!

They're so punctual that delays issue a certificate for employees to present to employers*

* Source: random article

I have lived in Switzerland for year and my very limited experience with trains in Scotland has been great. Trains were on time, and personel at the railway stations were very polite and helpful with us.

But maybe we were just lucky.

America has much more serious problems with rail, but the UK experience still isn't great. The broad root cause is that back in the day we had the genius idea of paying multiple private companies to run trains on shared lines. We set up metrics to measure their performance that, bluntly, do not work. They underinvest and when there's any sign they're not making money, they hand the contract back. All in all, we get all the disadvantages of a nationalised system with all the disadvantages of a privatised system with a couple of original problems thrown in for good measure.

But the train near my house still runs.

there is no doubt that the early ROSCO deals were outrageously tilted against taxpayers/passengers (they pay £1 for old BR trains the state paid for, then we pay them to rent them back)

however the newer ones are significantly better

funding the capital cost of a billion pounds of new trains isn't free (even for a government), and there is risk on that investment

they also maintain the trains (to varying levels of quality)

> ROSCOs exist because trains are so expensive that neither government nor TOCs can afford them.

Is this sarcasm that I am missing? There is absolutely no reason that Government (or a Government-owned business) couldn't "afford" rolling stock. That's a really poor excuse (and completely made up) if they claim that.

Maybe commuting can be a good deal sometimes, but for a 5 hour trip for 2 people with railcards, we were looking at £160ish when booked in advance (!) or £400ish if not.

If we drive our car, this is 4 hours with less than £35 of petrol (the full tank is approx £35 and it gets us there and some of the way back).

Booking in advance and having to get stressed about making it to the station on time, dealing with the frequent delays (I only started driving a year or two ago, so for many years I've been coping with the train, and genuinely it is delayed 50% or more for this journey in my experience) which can easily be another 2 hours on top etc, having to process the delay repay evidence for that, ...

Add to that, these 'cheap' fares are usually for awkward times, like arriving late at night. And then I have to get someone to pick me up from the station on the far end as well.

You can rightfully point out that my car needs maintenance too, but we have to do that anyway and I'd still argue that it's not enough to make up the difference.

Very tangentially, but a few years ago I was travelling at Christmas and the ticket machines were broken so wouldn't dispense the ticket I had already bought (for collection on departure). The station staff and train staff let us through for 2 trains, but on the 3rd train the guard was so vicious and insisted we pay for a whole new ticket for the whole journey, at full price with no railcard discounts or anything, which came to the aforementioned £400 when we had already paid £160. Was she right to do this? Maybe, but merry Christmas lol.

We were pretty miffed to say the least and it definitely spoilt the Christmas time a bit! £400 is not nothing for us to say the least. I eventually got it back by filing a chargeback with my bank. The train company never answered my e-mails or apparently even Mastercard's communications on the matter, so the ruling went to me by default. Kind of amusing in a way, but not an experience I'd like to repeat and it took 4 months.

So is the train not dire? I can't say I'm rushing to get back on it.

It's expensive for irregular users.

If I want to visit friends in Derby, coming from London, that's £81. For no good reason, a return ticket is £84.

If I need to travel at peak times, that's £123.

Booked months in advance it might be £20, roughly what a bus ticket costs.

Well yeah, you're not going to take a train to the corner store. Your PDF notes that 29% of trips are made on foot.

2% of trips by train is a lot higher than the number of trips by airplane... And again, 8% of people using trains once a week is a lot higher than they use planes...

...And yet I don't think anybody "grossly overestimates" the social and economic importance of airplanes.

People use trains to visit family, go sightseeing, and so forth. They're a hugely important part of infrastructure, even if most people don't use them daily.

Now try closing the railways of south-east England and see how well the roads hold up without them.

Gas taxes and toll revenue account for about 1/3 of road infrastructure spend these days. This is significantly less than years past as the fixed gas tax hasn't kept up with inflation or adjusted upwards enough to match efficiency gains.

You could say the same about rail infrastructure, but you cannot use private vehicles there (legally).

Roads allow goods and services to be imported and exported from an area. The subsidy brings public benefit.

Insurance on a beater can be quite low if you’re not a young male or bad driver. Like $1-200/yr.

The difference is that in America we have politicians who cultivate a fear of cities, public transportation, and not owning a bigger car than you need.

Trains and buses in the US, where they exist, have ticket prices on par with the amount of gas a single person would use driving a used car. For very long trips they're a bit cheaper (up to 2x). For very short trips they're often a lot more expensive (up to 5x). For trips more than an hour or two, the one-way cost usually has no significant discount on a round-trip ticket, and you can pay 10x more if you don't buy well in advance and go on the cheapest days.

The effects of that vary. Relating to TFA, if you were making this trip 6x per year, could plan the dates, were always travelling alone, and didn't need any transportation anywhere the rest of the year beyond what walking and biking could provide, you'd expect the train to be about break-even with gas+maintenance. It wouldn't be worth having the car.

As soon as any of those assumptions change though, that logic goes out the window.

Suppose you have to get to work (and that rent/housing is enough higher near work that it's worth commuting _somehow_ by a substantial margin). The markup for short trips is very high for public transit, Uber, and all your other normal alternatives. You'll be money ahead on a decent used car (clean, no body damage, new enough to easily last 100k miles even if you know nothing about cars) in a year, even counting the entire purchase price, taxes, insurance, and everything else.

Under the assumption you have a car already and only have to consider unit costs (depreciation, gas, maintenance), trips like TFA can start to make a lot of sense to drive, depending on your personal preferences. Every long bus trip I've taken in the US has been so rattly and bumpy that I couldn't sleep or type anyway, and by the end of a trip they've been so full that I couldn't type anyway (tall, broad shoulders, the geometry doesn't work out in narrow seats with so little space to the seat in front of me that I already have to angle my legs just to fit). I'd much rather listen to my own music or a cooking show or something, keep the temperature exactly where I'd like it, have the flexibility to carry a few extra items, and get to my destination in half the time without stopping 20 places to pick up more passengers. When the money's a wash, I'll pick the car every time.

If you're willing to make tweaks to your life to save money/fuel/..., it's also worth looking at the possibility of carpooling. If you can go with one other coworker, you're already a lot of money ahead on the train. If you additionally didn't know your return date in advance (variable length job, which you're staying at for a small but undetermined number of days), the difference in ticket prices would be enough to completely pay for insurance and taxes for the year, on top of depreciation, gas, and maintenance. Those 6 trips would justify owning a used car for any other part of your life where the unit economics made sense.

If you work remotely, live in a nice climate close to groceries, or have any number of other nice properties to your life, a car doesn't necessarily make sense. Our infrastructure doesn't often make the alternatives pleasant though. E.g., I was pretty adamant about biking through college. The city wouldn't plow the bike paths till days after any major snowstorm though, the snow was always falling into the edges of the road, and there was a zero percent chance I was going to bike out in the middle of an icy 45mph road in front of pickup trucks who think it's sane to tailgate in those conditions. 6+ months each year, the only non-car option was walking. I did that a couple winters, but 5 miles each way is a bear when you're trudging through snow, and the one semester I had an evening class I always thought long and hard about whether I'd stay at school an extra 8 hours or add an extra 10 miles to my day.

Details vary, but _most_ Americans are in some sort of similar situation where cars are the only realistic option if you can possibly afford it. Trudging through the snow when it's <-10F the entire month of January is fine if you're young and single, but I wouldn't want to carry a kid to their doctor in that environment. Tons of people just live too far from town for non-car options to be practical. Roads poorly designed for rain and pedestrians limit the safety and practicality of biking in other huge swathes of the country. And so on.

Mind you, I'm not against public transport or anything. The BART trains here in the Bay are something I use a few times a year, and they're perfectly fine. You can even get work done on them if you'd like. My point is that cases where trains and buses are the best option (or even any option) are so rare that for most Americans you can assume that the cost of insurance and taxes for a car have already been taken care of, so that only the unit economics of a given trip play into whether you'd drive or not (when considering it financially).

Car owners live in denial about the costs of their vehicles. They often believe their only cost is gas and maybe insurance.

OC should not be blamed for such ugly company policies, blame Amazon.

Did you get there in the end?

Depending on when you travel, it can be very expensive. If I want to travel at peak time (arriving into London before 10am, and out before 7pm), then we're looking at around £400

GP's comment sounds like hell for a few bucks. I'll avoid making any other observations.

I'm from the States, but it generally varies from employer to employer and role to role. If you're sitting on a support queue in a specific time zone then yes, there's often an expectation of consistent hours; for more general office work (especially since COVID), there's often an understood degree of flexibility in most cases.

As for transit delays, yes, those are also often excused within reason so long as there's not a recurring pattern. Still, hybrid work policies give workers wiggle room to reasonably challenge these requirements, especially if they're already completing all assigned work from home without issue, and that's the main point I was trying to make with my comment.

Labor is ultimately a negotiation, and this is one such tactic to take if it's available to you.

Reminds me of the "Chase Infinite Money Glitch" micro fad from last year. Turns out fraud really is pathway to many forms of free goods the law would consider illegal.

Wonder how many people wound up getting hit with check fraud charges off of that...

Your mind is correct.