When a single rail fare needs six taps

The journey is twenty-eight miles. The train leaves on the hour. The cheapest valid ticket, for this particular off-peak Tuesday, is a split between three fares bought in a specific order, from one of two apps, with a passenger discount that is not displayed by default. The fine, if you buy a plausible but wrong combination of tickets, is sometimes nothing and sometimes a penalty fare. Welcome to Great British Railways, in theory. In practice, welcome to a terminal full of adults frowning at their phones.

British rail ticketing is not expensive by European standards for every journey, and a lot of seats on quiet trains are a bargain if you know where to look. The problem is not price. The problem is that paying the right price has become a short exam, and plenty of people are failing it on a Tuesday morning when they only wanted to go and see their mum.

The seven ticket families, briefly

If you want a map of the mess, National Rail’s own page lays it out: anytime, off-peak, super off-peak, advance, singles, returns, and the various railcards and season tickets. None of these words mean quite what a civilian would expect them to mean.

• Anytime is any train, full price.
• Off-peak is cheaper, valid outside peak hours that are defined by each train company, usually from some hour in the morning to some hour in the evening, with exceptions for Fridays, football, and Christmas.
• Super off-peak is cheaper still, with tighter rules about which trains it covers, not every route.
• Advance is a specific train at a specific time, sold ahead, often very cheap and entirely non-refundable if you miss the train.
• Singles and returns used to matter in a predictable way. Now, on many routes, two singles are cheaper than a return, and on a few routes a return is cheaper than a single.
• Railcards are a third of a ticket off for a lot of people, and most of the people entitled to one do not have one because the website for buying them is forgettable.

Split tickets, the great loophole

The ticketing rule that quietly matters is that you can break your journey at any station the train actually stops at, and buy a separate ticket for each leg. For some trips, mostly cross-country ones, this is cheaper than a single ticket for the whole journey. It should not be. There is no good reason for it. It is a consequence of the privatised fare-setting left over from the 1990s, and successive governments have promised to clean it up without quite doing so.

A few apps now do the split automatically and take a small cut. That is a reasonable thing to pay for. It also means the fair price is the price you get only if you use a third-party tool. If a system needs an aftermarket app to deliver its own best offer, the system has an interface problem.

The fair price is the one the app worked out, not the one the company offered you.

The six-tap problem

Try to buy a Tuesday off-peak single from Reading to Hereford on a phone, without a railcard, and the clock on the screen runs down while you make a small number of choices that feel significant. Do you want outbound only, or return? Do you want to pick a specific train, or any train in the window? Do you want a seat reservation, which may cost nothing or may cost extra depending on the train? Do you want to save five pounds by buying two singles, which the app will offer only if you have ticked a small box called advanced options?

Each of these decisions is defensible on its own. Together they are a design that has given up. If the same journey, the same day, the same train and the same passenger can produce half a dozen prices depending on which sequence of taps you perform, the honest thing would be to pick the lowest and charge it. The current system is, in effect, charging a literacy fee.

What a sensible system looks like

The simplest fair improvement, which has been promised in one form or another since the last big review, is to default to the cheapest valid fare for the journey and the passenger. You enter where you are going, who you are, when you want to travel. You get one ticket, at the cheapest legal price. You get the option to see the breakdown if you care. You stop needing to run a spreadsheet to go to York.

That would not be a revolution. It is roughly what the Oyster system does in London for day travel, and roughly what a dozen countries manage with a smart card. It is the opposite of what the ticketing experience has drifted into on the national railway, where the fare is a kind of puzzle box.

When it goes wrong

If you get on the wrong train with an advance ticket, you can often buy a new one at the gate, though it is not cheap. If you get on the right train with a ticket that is actually valid for a different route, you are at the mercy of the guard, who is usually a human being and often reasonable if you are. Keep the receipt, and if you think you have been overcharged in a way that will not resolve, the independent rail ombudsman is explained by Citizens Advice: free, and it exists precisely because operators do not always get it right.

If you find yourself disputing a penalty, write it all down the day it happens: the train you took, the ticket you had, the station staff you spoke to. Memory is poor and clerks are busy. A dated note is harder to argue with. If the dispute hits a wall, Which? and Citizens Advice both have free templates for complaint letters that are more effective than being very annoyed on social media.

Small habits that help

Book earlier. A ticket bought a day ahead for most leisure journeys is noticeably cheaper than one bought on the platform. Carry a railcard you are entitled to; the Senior, 16–25, Two Together and Disabled Persons cards pay for themselves on roughly three journeys. For a regular journey, try the split-ticket apps once and look at the breakdown. Sometimes the saving is small enough that the extra faff is not worth it. Sometimes it is nine pounds for a tap and a half.

And if you are travelling with someone older who is not glued to a phone, offer to buy their ticket in advance. The queues at the ticket office are shorter than they used to be only because many ticket offices have been closed. The person at the window, when there is one, is usually underpaid and overworked. They are not the architect of this maze.

The quiet case for simplicity

The railway is a complicated system that is operated by lots of different companies, which is partly why the ticketing is complicated too. That is a reason, not an excuse. Every time another ticket type is invented to solve one operator’s revenue problem, a passenger somewhere stops taking the train. You can see it in the quiet mid-morning carriages, full of empty seats a casual traveller could not justify paying for.

A railway that felt simple to use would carry more people. That would be a greener country, and a less tense one. It would also mean the person in the booking hall could help with anything other than ticket arithmetic. Until then: book earlier, carry a railcard, and pack a snack. The train station car park is its own column.