At last. Some good news on the railway: literally overnight hundreds of rail fares have almost halved.
On Saturday evening an off-peak single ticket from York to London cost £130. On Sunday morning it will be £68. From Berwick to Peterborough, the fare falls from £139 to £73.
From today, return off-peak train fares have been scrapped in favour of simplified “single-leg” pricing.
But before train travellers get too excited, this applies only to London North Eastern Railway (LNER) on the East Coast main line.
How will removing some of the anomalies in the fares system affect your journey plans? These are the key questions and answers.
Many people feel they are too high, and this move should address some of those concerns. More broadly, the rail industry (now almost completely controlled by the government once again), is hobbled with an anachronous fares system.
It was devised in the 20th century by British Rail for entirely different times and without the concept of online booking.
Rules have been “baked in” since privatisation that typically make an off-peak single ticket almost the same as a return.
Off-peak tickets are much more flexible than advance tickets, since they can be used on a wide range of trains and allow breaks in journeys – subject only to rules on timing, avoiding rush hours.
But one-way off-peak fares can be punitive.
Between Durham and London, for example, until today the off-peak single cost £163, with a return priced at only £1 more. It is now £83, a saving of 49 per cent.
This disparity was a deterrent to people who wanted to make journeys on a one-way basis (eg Durham to London by train, back by coach) or put together “circular” journeys such as Durham-London-Manchester-Durham.
There are just three kinds of tickets:
That one-way Durham to London super off-peak ticket has fallen by £80 to £83.
Yes, in a very limited way on the East Coast main line. An experimental scheme with LNER between London, Leeds, Newcastle and Edinburgh has seen “single-leg” pricing on off-peak tickets for the past three years.
The move proved extremely popular – and, inadvertently, created even more anomalies. From Durham to London, for example, a one-way traveller until today would rationally buy a Newcastle-London ticket for £79 even though it is for a further distance; this saves £75 on the trip.
Now, the idea is to make single-leg pricing the norm across the LNER network.
For the train operator, there is a revenue protection aspect too: preventing the repeated use of open return tickets that are not checked. Because all tickets are sold for travel on a specific day, the risk of this particular kind of ticket fraud is eliminated.
Mostly down, with single fares almost halved – to exactly half the current return fare. People who routinely make return journeys should notice no difference (except for the annual fare increase, this year 5.9 per cent).
