Odd. I get the £58 fare on nationalrail.co.uk and it's Any Permitted according to https://www.brfares.com/!fares?orig=BTH^» (Bath Spa - next trains)&dest=WSF&rlc=SRN&period=20231001. VIA HEREFORD is a tad cheaper but would exclude useful routes via Birmingham. I can't get an £82 fare at all. I often have trouble with NRE^‡(resolve) retaining old info so I'd suspect a cache issue.

Harder of course to thank the bus driver in London or the surprisingly few other cities that have 2-door buses so you get off further back.  On the basis that they should be monitoring the door through a mirror or CCTV^▸ (Closed Circuit Tele Vision) before closing it, I tend to wave a thank you.

An alternative article headline could be "Millions of rail passengers save money just by avoiding the busiest trains". It's rather the point of fare setting if done properly, which isn't easy (cue comments about travelling on empty peak train or rammed off-peak one!). It's also one of the main aims of rail competition, perhaps best exemplified by London-Birmingham, with 3 companies offering different levels of speed, comfort and service at different prices.  You might of course argue that instead of competing, the rail industry should be run with enough capacity on the fast service to remove the need to price people off it onto slower trains.

The article incidentally quickly descends into a promotional piece about a ticket selling website.

As the article says, "The academic requirements are minimal and the perks generous", but for some reason no-one who complains about their pay rates seems to apply to be a train driver.

I'd guess the people queueing for U-Boat tickets were regarding it as a sightseeing trip rather than public transport so using a TVM^▸ (Ticket Vending Machine) possibly didn't seem relevant to them.  At the other extreme you can actually use payg by tapping on a yellow reader the same way as you do on LU/NR^» (Network Rail - home page) services (different fares and no day caps or 60+ concessions though), but I presume that wasn't made obvious.  Uber hardly shout about it on their website; it's buried in a "Commute by river" section which perhaps indicates they want to keep it as a niche option.  Rather like the Cable Car they probably want the opportunity to do some "upselling", maybe selling a souvenir with your ticket, or admission to another tourist attraction?

Dare I point out that the title of this post is misleading?  "Wrong road" means the track for the opposite direction (down instead of up, west instead of east etc); this was a case of wrong route.

In general a driver should be able to tell in advance which way the train is being sent from the signals shown and if possible should stop the train rather than "accept" a wrong route, so avoiding the need to get permission to put the engine into reverse (sigh!) and back up.  None of this was unsafe but all rather disruptive and there'll no doubt be a bit of an investigation into both the signaller's and driver's respective involvement, quite possibly to be able to put on record that the driver followed the correct process in an unusual situation.

I think they mean it's the only way to buy a Zonal season rather than a point-to-point.

Sloppy journalism. As I understand it, Reading council simply owns one of several companies running buses in Reading, effectively in competition with any other operator who chooses to run when and where they like in Reading (subject to meeting certain legal requirements, registering the route etc) . That's very different from Greater Manchester which plans the overall network, sets fares and does a tendering arrangement for the right to run each route.

I'm sure there's something for other local authorities to learn from both approaches.

8. Baker Street.  The decorated overhead beams gave it to me before I looked at anything else to confirm.

I suppose hypothetically and coincidentally it could be a different 64 but probably not.  It's odd given the police backup that the revenue staff apparently only issued penalty fares and didn't take any case forward for prosecution which can be done for deliberate avoidance, implicit in "chosen not to pay". Maybe they were so busy they didn't have time for the extra paperwork involved, but they often like to make an example of a few as a deterrent.  Some people bank on being checked so rarely that the occasional PF^▸ (Penalty Fare) (and it's £50 if you pay at the time, not £100 so the police Tweet - "X", surely? - was disingenuous) is cheaper than paying every day, and if you do pay on the spot I don't think you even get your details taken.

The problem at Brentwood is partly that the station is now run by Transport for London, who as noted did fund lifts to 3 platforms, no doubt the simplest ones to do, despite Brentwood being in Essex.  Part of the "challenge" is probably that TfL^» (Transport for London - about) don't want to spend too much money on a station well outside London and think either the local authority, or Greater Anglia as the other train operator serving Brentwood, or the DfT^» (Department for Transport - about), should fund further work.

...which might be an illustration of how remote the investors are from the company they're buying, or maybe just a poorly-worded press release or sloppy journalism.

Off topic, but it's the first time I've come across a local news website with a paywall. They're normally desperate for you to visit so they can swamp your screen with ads and clickbait to more ads.

Back on topic, a local retail park has a "No return within 3 (or similar - I forget the detail!) hours" rule for parking.  Not quite sure what they're trying to achieve, but it makes it difficult to drop someone off to pick up later, or nip back 'cos you've forgotten something or the thing you bought is faulty, without the risk of having to fend off attempts to levy a (probably unenforceable) penalty. 

Shades of Go-op here possibly?  Evolyn have a large number of hoops to jump through before any trains run.

If it does go ahead there might even be a risk of it actually increasing fares rather than reducing them. There will be more competition for a limited number of train paths through the tunnel so the tunnel owners might manage to push up the fees they charge.

It's their T3 https://www.swanagerailway.co.uk/events/view/563-returns-to-steam, a gorgeous Adams-designed Victorian era loco.  I tend to think all steam locos look the same, but there's something rather special about this one; well worth going to see if you get the chance.