22/04/12 16:25 [Sunday]
I am on a train to Edinburgh and it is quite like old times: that is the escapism of travelling to distant places. I decided to go to Edinburgh when I found I could afford to do so relatively easily through discovering in travelling between Birmingham and Doncaster that it is true one can save money on the fare by booking in advance. Whenever in the past I have tried to do that all I have achieved was to pay the same fare online as I could have got at the ticket office on the day of departure. However one of Dawn’s sisters put me on to the idea of booking stages of the journey separately, so that I now travel when coming north: from Birmingham to Derby, from Derby to Sheffield and from Sheffield to Doncaster. It is a help to the train companies that people pick and choose to travel on less busy services (which I automatically find by choosing the lowest priced fares) because they are thereby using capacity better. This idea of a price mechanism for seats would not have obtained before Mrs Thatcher’s Government privatised the railways and while I don’t often mention political points on my blog I will say that the Labour policy of making prices for train travel the same whether you book online or at the ticket office is backward looking and inefficient. By booking online you are doing more than half the work of the booking clerk so as well as the mechanism of supply and demand driving down your fare if you choose a service helping towards efficiency (one fewer other people want to use) you deserve a reward for doing that work.
However in the case of Doncaster to Edinburgh I booked weeks in advance and got a cheap fare for the whole journey as a single trip. I think for certain very popular routes - like the East Coast Mainline or more generally trips from or to London - cheap fares are released for quite long journeys and not simply for single stages.
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