Trains

I was planning to visit my mother this week. I purchased train tickets for the journey several weeks ago. They cost £212. Is that reasonable? Hard to say. I’m inclined to think not. Given an ongoing climate crisis,⊕I shall leave aside the relative discomfort and inconvenience of second class rail travel and the absurdity of having travel to, and across(!), London to get from Swansea to Norwich. I think public transportation should be heavily subsidized to make it obviously less expensive than driving, which that isn’t.

Unfortunately, I caught a nasty cold (still COVID negative, thankfully). Above and beyond not wanting to give this cold to my mother, I think if you’re unwell, you should stay home. So I canceled the journey and requested a refund.

I was offered a refund of £80. Is that reasonable? Absolutely bloody not! It suggests that more than 60% of the ticket cost was associated with the wholly automated online system I used to book and purchase the tickets. I suppose I’m lucky that there’s some law or regulation that prevents them from simply claiming the ticket is entirely non-refundable.

I should say, I’m not opposed to a booking fee: £10, £20, even £40. It makes sense that the number of tickets sold should be a good advanced predictor of the number of passengers on the day. You want to discourage arbitrary cancellations. But £132 is obscene. And why is it a fraction of the ticket price anyway? It’s a scheduled service! It’s going to run whether I’m on board or not!

But wait. It gets better.

Often, when I buy train tickets, I’m offered online tickets. Where for “offered” read “aggressively marketed” so that I’ll install their damned app. Fine. Whatever. It’s convenient.

But sometimes, I can only get paper tickets. I don’t know why. Perhaps some Brexit-related shortage of QR codes that no one wants to talk about. This journey: paper tickets.

You can get tickets mailed to you in advance, but that just increases the chances that they’ll be lost or misplaced, so I do what everyone else does, I collect them at the station moments before my journey begins.

To get the refund, I am required to mail the paper tickets to a post office box in Edinburgh. Tickets I have not collected. Tickets that any reasonable system could know that I have not collected.

So I dragged myself, coughing and wheezing into a mask, all the way to the train station yesterday before the scheduled departure time of my train so that I could put my credit card and a booking reference code into a wholly automated machine so that it would print tickets that I could put in an envelope and mail. For £7. Because they recommend that you use delivery tracking.

Nationalize public infrastructure. Run it as a service to the public. Pay for it by taxing billionaires out of existence.