The Anonymous Widower

Thoughts on Rail Ticketing

Modern Railways this month provokes a lot of thoughts with reasoned articles on the financing of the UK’s rail system and developments in ticketing.

1. Ian Walmsley argues in an article called Rail’s Big Chance, that the rising oil price is the biggest opportunity for rail since the steam engine.
2. An unsigned article describes how ticketing technology is developing, especially with regard to using bank and credit cards instead of cards like the popular Oyster on the London Underground.
3. Chris Stokes goes surfing on the Internet for tickets and says that the companies could do better.

In my view rail is missing a few things and there needs to be a holistic approach to fulfil the objectives for the rail companies and passengers alike.

1. The rail companies will want to tempt as many passengers as they can from their cars and keep them.
2. The rail companies will definitely want the best cash-flow possible. In one sense this means having trains as full as possible at all times of the week and day.  But it also probably means using innovative ways to sell tickets.
3. Passengers will want the best value and trains at times to suit their needs. They will also want easy-to-use ticketing systems.

With respect to the first objective, they may be attracting new passengers, but are they trying their hardest to keep them?

Many of these new passengers will be business ones travelling on expenses. These passengers have traditionally been encouraged by loyalty schemes from Green Shield Stamps in the 1960s to Air Miles and airline loyalty schemes now. Their companies pay the travel expenses, but they get the rewards.  I know people who live in East Anglia and when they go to Scotland drive to a London Airport  to fly with their favourite airline to collect the points, when perhaps driving to Peterborough and taking the train will be quicker and cheaper. The points are more important to them, than their company’s money.

There should be a nationwide rail and possibly tram and bus too, loyalty scheme.  Perhaps it should be linked to a credit card, that also doubles as your Railcard, so it will work in London as your Oystercard and in Manchester, Sheffield and Birmingham on the trams. And of course everywhere on the buses!

I know I’d have one like a shot, as it would mean only carrying one card instead of three; credit card, Freedom Pass and Railcard. It would also make accounting for your expenses a lot easier, if you needed to account for everything.

So this move would benefit both rail companies and passengers.

A lot of passengers don’t like the hassle of buying a ticket.  Turn up at a station as I did recently at Weybridge at eleven at night and if you are unfamiliar with the line, or if there is no-one around, you may struggle to buy a ticket, when it should be a welcoming experience. Touch-in and touch-out systems like Oyster or Freedom Pass should be the norm all over the country and this will happen almost universally when bank and credit cards can be used.

I also like the idea of bulk buying of tickets in advance. I live in London and have a season ticket at Portman Road to see Ipswich Town. I usually travel First Class these days and on Saturday I always use the same trains and tickets.  Since my Freedom Pass arrived, it’s a Second Class Off-Peak Return from Harold Wood to Ipswich and an Upgrade to First Class for the whole journey. I usually buy them from the ticket office, as this cheapest fare is probably a bit complicated for me to buy from a machine. So why can’t I buy these tickets in batches of ten or so and then validate them before I get on the train? I would save time, even if I didn’t get a discount and the rail company would save expenses in the booking office.  They’d also have my money in advance and f Town had a bad season, they might even find I didn’t use all the tickets. After all when we buy stamps, we buy them in books of 12 or so and rarely as singles. So why not rail tickets?

Years ago, I ran a company in Ipswich and we sometimes had to send people to London for the day. Inevitably we’d give people a cash advance for the ticket, but it would have been so much easier to give them a ticket, that they validated before travelling.

Bulk buying in advance would benefit a large number of passengers from commuters, who only did a journey perhaps three times a week, to businesses, who needed to send staff at short notice to clients in say London.

The rail industry now has the technology to do all sorts of things for the benefit of both rail companies and passengers alike.

March 3, 2011 - Posted by AnonW | Transport/Travel | London Underground, Trains