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From the Daily Mail (https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7016951/Travelling-train-13-times-expensive-driving.html)


Their highest ratio was Luton to Cambridge - £84.60 cost of peak return ticket v £6.40 cost of petrol - 13 times. Second was Bath to Southampton - £125.70 v £11.79 - 10.5 times.

They admit in the article


I don't know where their £125.70 came from for Bath Spa to Southampton - brfares quotes me £195.00 anytime return "not via London" ...and just £35.80 via Salisbury which is the natural route to take virtually every time.  And with a senior card that's down to £23.65.   Peak fare - remember.  Mind you - replace petrol / diesel by electricity and you cut your fuel cost to £4.89 - https://www.nextgreencar.com/cost-calculators/nissan/leaf/ .

The £84.60 Luton to Cambridge is a dubious fare too ... 2 x anytime single.   They say "fares we were quoted" and I suggest that whoever asked for the quote carefully chose different days to get the highest cost they could for a journey which I will admit is really awkward by train.   Real "Great Way Round" stuff through London.

Yes that Bath Spa to Southampton fare is nonsense. The anytime return inc peak hours is £35-80 and the off peak is £28-30. If returning another day, you can add on about £4 to the fare. There is no reason to use any other than the direct route, but even if you did, a return via Reading isn't anywhere near as expensive as the fare quoted by that article. I'm guessing that that fare is via London.

Many fares from Bath Spa do seem to be prohibitively expensive compared to some other places, but the Southampton fare is actually remarkably cheap compared to most of a similar distance, and that route does also have cheaper advance fares.

And how many actually pay £327 to travel from London to Manchester?

…...an impartial view from a consumer expert within the article?


Guy Anker, of consumer website Moneysavingexpert.com, said: ‘Rail prices can be an absolute rip-off compared to other modes of transport such as driving and even flying. Even if you use every trick in the book the chances are driving will be cheaper, especially if there are a few of you.’

I don’t think anyone would disagree with that statement.  The key word being ‘can’.

We all know there are horrendously extortionate fares out there, just as there are also some absolute bargains to be had.

Picking Luton to Cambridge as a rail journey is a bit daft as it is quicker by a direct coach, although the cost of that is typically £15-£19.

A different comparison there might be with a cab fare which would be around £75.

There's a W missing from your italic section.

Great to see children contributing to the Forum!

It's nice to see my former headmaster on here too! Good to hear that you were cleared of all charges.

Typical hysterical load of Daily Wail garbage !

Ignoring the gross errors in the rail fares quoted, the Wail seems to have ignored/forgotten/missed/never thought of the most important point in their non-story............Your train fare gets you a ride (possibly even a seat !) to your destination.
The "cost" of the car journey is for x gallons/litres of petrol - no more, not even a can to put the petrol in, let alone a vehicle ! Do I just throw a match into the petrol and hope the resulting explosion is large enough to blow me to Southampton, Manchester or wherever ?
I have just put some figures into a "car costs calculator" on the "This is Money" website - it tells me that my Fiesta costs me 79p a mile to run !!  Makes the rail fares look a bargain.

PS: Do Ford do a Senior Road Card to get me 33% off the car costs ??

I drove to Weston super mare and back last Saturday with my children. My 2.0 diesel car averaged 67.2mpg on this round trip. I forget the distance but I’d guess around 200 miles round trip... but it’s not material such is the astronomical train price, 1 adult 2 children.
I could have got 20 gallons of diesel (or maybe more) for the train fare, enough to travel over 1000miles!

......I think perhaps the Mail is not the only one being "hysterical"?  ;)

It's a valid point that rail travel can be extremely expensive, almost invariably more so than jumping in the car, particularly if there is a family or group involved, or if the travel is taking place on a "walk up" basis, rather than with the benefit of enough available planning time to obtain a "cheaper" advance ticket - the cost of driving doesn't alter whether you decide to go at one minute or one months notice, and 4 people in a car only cost fractionally more in terms of fuel consumption, whereas 4 train tickets? Considerably more, particularly if Groupsave isn't available/possible.

There is also the ridiculous amount of different fares, splitting, etc, some of which not available from all sources which further complicate the issue.

II hits the nail on the head (as so often) - train fares "can" be a ripoff (can is the pivotal word), some can be cheaper, most are somewhere in between, very few will prove cheaper than a car journey.

No matter how keen one is on trains, or reluctant to accept anything from the Daily Mail, it's important to keep perspective (…..and avoid hysteria!)  :)

They must have been very naughty then to deserve that.

No - don't avoid the hysteria - it's lovely this time of year !

(http://i67.tinypic.com/28806bt.jpg)

Haha

Just left the car with a friend for flying from Bristol airport. Didn’t visit anywhere in the town.

All this correct, but it made me start wondering exactly how many anytime tickets on any given route are sold in proportion to the total number of tickets sold for that route?

To take Chippenham to Paddington as an example, the three basic return fares in standard class  (excluding any advance tickets, railcard discounts or splitting)  are anytime £178.00, off peak £74.60, super off  peak £55.90. It is also worth mentioning that  a weekly season CPM to PAD only (ie. excluding LT travelcard) is £282.30. For a regular 5-day-week commuter, this equates to £56.46 per trip, only 56 pence more than a super off peak return, and you also have the option of using at weekends too if you have a mind to.  http://www.brfares.com/#!fares?orig=CPM&dest=PAD

So who in their right minds are going to buy an anytime return ticket? Regular commuters certainly won't. 99% of leisure travellers aren't going to either. It is generally going to be a very small select group of people who, for example, are going for one-off business meetings or, perhaps, have to be at an airport before the off peak fares kick in.

I often make the point on non-railway forums when the subject of "criminal BR Fares" comes up (and especially when the prices are compared to air travel) - "Try walking into Heathrow tomorrow morning and asking for a ticket on the next flight to Aberdeen, and see how much BA will screw out of you..." The common counter-argument is "but people plan ahead when they're flying" and they get the reply "to which the answer is obvious, isn't it? Think ahead and get a cheap rail fare"

But the thing that "grinds my gears" about this sort of Wail drivel is not that a coach and horses can be driven through their reasoning, but that huge numbers of their readers believe it to be gospel truth. And these people, based on the swill the Mail and similar papers have fed them, won't go and find out for themselves when they would find a completely different, and more accurate, picture. In short, it is costing the railways money in lost potential fares.

Even people who should know better can get drawn in by this nonsense. A few years go my old school friend who now lives in Berlin happened to be over when I was doing a walk with the Railway Ramblers between Swindon Old Town and Cricklade, including a ride on the railway that inconveniently bisects the footpath and cycle track ( :) ) and I invited him along. He was talking about driving to Swindon and parking there all day (Gawd knows where he thought he could park all day on a Saturday anywhere central...), because he had become so convinced by stories like this that he thought he'd have to take out a mortgage for his off peak return from Bristol...

Of course, whenever anyone takes the press to issue about misreporting or leading it's readers up the garden path by misrepresenting the facts, and wanting to take steps to stop them doing it (eg Leveson enquiry), those self same journalists who write this tripe start bleating about the freedom of the press being undermined.

Funny old world, innit?

Thought I'd try that:

Single Economy/Std Class ticket, London to Aberdeen for tomorrow:
Air (BA):   £287 to £384.Depending on time of flight.
Rail:         £181.50 - Anytime day single:  £102 - Advance single (still showing as avaliable) (First Class Advance - £135)

I hear the gentle thud of a case resting.

Will you tell The Wail or shall  I?  ;D

Easyjet is quoting £130 for tomorrow though from Luton.

Easyjet is even cheaper than driving, last time my Bristol to Glasgow and back cost, Bristol to Glasgow, £24.99 and Glasgow to Bristol. £22.98, in total £47.97, less than the total cost of a full tank of petrol into my Ford Fusion.

It would be more correct to say "Easyjet CAN BE cheaper than driving" since the fares vary depending on demand.   That's the problem here its like Magabus' £1 fares adverts if you only quote the lowest price that is only occasionally available or only available to a few travelers then it always looks cheap. 

All this is true, but the Mail was reporting on "walk up" fares and so was I with my Chippenham to Paddington examples. Of course you can get a cheaper deal with Easyjet if you book an "advance" ticker, in exactly the same way as you can with a rail ticket.

Another thing worth remembering with airlines, especially the budget ones, is that the price can go up markedly if you are taking baggage along with you.

In point of fact The Mail was reporting on Railway v Road, with only the tiniest reference to air from one of the independent sources.....for what it's worth, IMHO using the London-Aberdeen example you cited, 1hr 45 by air v 7 hours by train,  for only a few £ extra from London Luton? No contest.......but anyway as you were! 🙂

My mentioning walk-up fares on airlines did send the comtributors a little off topic, so getting back to the crux of the issue by using a similar comparison:

As posted above, anytime single London to Aberdeen £181.50
Google maps tells me it is 546 miles by road and the journey would currently take 10h 42m. At 18ppm (the cost of diesel for my elderly  2.2L Mercedes) that would cost me just short of £100 in my car. Add in maintenance and repair costs (which I have found to be approximately equal to the fuel cost) takes the total to just short of £200. Depreciation would not be an issue for me (because it's a 1998 Merc and only cost me £1600 when I bought it ten years ago!) but it would be for others, more than offsetting the savings on repair and maintenance for a newer car. Tax and insurance would be fixed costs that you would pay for having the car in the first lace, so you wouldm't reasonably apportion them to a trip like this.

So in summary, walk up fares are air £287 cheapest and takes 105 mins; rail £181.50 and takes 7 hours, road c.£200 and takes just under 11 hours.

As the say, you pays your money and takes your choice. I can't see any numbers in there that support the "thirteen times more expensive" claim, though :)

Can you point me to the section of the article which claims that rail travel from London to Aberdeen is 13 times more expensive? (Apologies if I've missed it if it's obvious, at my age the eyes aren't as good as they used to be!)

Original Story picked up by Somerset Live (https://www.somersetlive.co.uk/news/somerset-news/train-travel-bath-ticket-prices-2886281)

I like the way that the press does not let the truth get in the way of a good story.  The obvious route from Southampton to Bath by train is via Salisbury - a through train.  The peak return fare by that route is £35.80, not the £125.70 quoted.  Also I would like to know how they calculated the petrol cost.  I have a small, economical car, but I calculated my petrol cost at over £16.  Journey time is also a consideration. Train is generally 86 minutes.  Google does not give an accurate journey time for peak travel but states up to 150 minutes.  Yes the train is more expensive  than just petrol costs but that is not the only consideration in choosing mode of travel.

It's even more extreme than that. BRfares gives these return fares (all GWR priced):
Via Salisbury £28.30 (day) £32.40 (OPk) £35.80 (AT)
"Not via London" £55.90 (SOP) £74.60 (OPk) £195! (AT)

OJP does offer some journeys even at the highest price, via Reading, but they are significantly slower.

Why didn't they just go the whole hog and quote a fare going via Thurso? :-[