Should peak fares in England be abolished?

[blimmo]

Tbh I think I've argued myself into agreeing with the LNER fares "trial" my main problem with it being that the flexible fares is too expensive.

 

[Bletchleyite]

Tbh I think I've argued myself into agreeing with the LNER fares "trial" my main problem with it being that the flexible fares is too expensive.

I could be sold on it if the Anytime Single from Kings Cross to Edinburgh was reduced to about £130-150 and all the other ones reduced to be roughly in distance proportion with that. It would however require a subsidy increase to do that, and so we're back where we were.

 

[blimmo]

If that only requires a subsidy increase and not a capacity increase then I think we're in agreement that that's a good model!

 

[yorksrob]

I see peak fares as a demand management tool - increasing prices to reduce demand on the busiest services. The problem is that is that generic blocks of time don't always correlate with demand. So somebody travelling on a quieter friday AM service has to pay peak fares, whereas someone travelling on a packed mid-afternoon before a weekend football game gets to benefit from lower fares. Is that fair?

The LNER trial system addresses this by pricing based on actual demand, not a pre-determined assumption. It doesn't seem to work perfectly, but the principle is that it works on a train-by-train basis and not just by targeting a generic block of services.

I'm intrigued why most people here seem to support peak fares but are strongly against extending the same principles to off-peak.

It doesn't work because people can't always predict or control when they need to travel.

On a fundamental level we don't expect motorists to put up with extremely variable prices according to demand, we shouldn't expect rail passengers to as well. The people who come up with these ideas are clueless as to what passengers actually need, which are fares that are reliably decent value.

== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: 17 May 2026 ==

That's the main reason, yes. Though it was part of Avanti's franchise agreement (which COVID knackered) to knock I think about 20-30% off Anytime fares. The effect of that had it happened would have been an interesting study.

We don't know if this trial has actually reduced subsidy.

 

[Bletchleyite]

We don't know if this trial has actually reduced subsidy.

Which, the LNER one? No, we don't, though there are suggestions that it is roughly revenue neutral around the place. But if they cut the Anytime fares it isn't really conceivable that it would be anything other than revenue negative.

 

[43096]

Yeah I don't think the price should be calculated based on the costs tbh. I'd rather it was calculated to be an attractive alternative to driving/whatever mode the railway is competing with on a given flow and subsidy used to make up the difference.

So where is that subsidy coming from? There's plenty of other subsidy needs outside the railway (health, welfare etc) that are of much higher priority for the taxpayer. It cannot be right that something used by a minority of the population keeps getting an ever increasing subsidy (and the railway has a massive "subsidy addiction" problem).

 

[quantinghome]

When were these premium fares for peak travel introduced? In my younger days there was a standard fare and a few discounted fares like cheap day returns..

They weren't. Peak a.k.a. anytime a.k.a open tickets were the original standard fare. The rough potted history is as follows (as far as I understand it):

- in the dim and distant past standard fares were set roughly by distance
- then from the 1960s they moved more to be demand-led
- some time later (1980s?) saver and super-saver fares a.k.a. off-peak tickets were introduced to increase use outside peak times, along with other off-peak promotions such as railcards. This then allowed BR to increase peak fares to maximise yield without adversely affecting off-peak demand.
- apex (forerunners of advance) fares were introduced in the late 80s/early 90s.
- privatisation legislation essentially preserved the peak / off-peak ticket system, with the addition of advance fares to further increase demand-based pricing. While off-peak fares were capped to RPI+X%, peak fares had no such restriction. Train operators (TOCs) could charge whatever they wanted for peak fares... and guess what? They did! So although peak fares were always quite expensive, it was at this point they went crazy. TOCs could also change the peak hours. Which they did.

 

[Iskra]

Which, the LNER one? No, we don't, though there are suggestions that it is roughly revenue neutral around the place. But if they cut the Anytime fares it isn't really conceivable that it would be anything other than revenue negative.

It would certainly be revenue negative initially, but might actually end up being positive in the long run. But very few decision-makers would be willing to take that risk, and this is why it’s easier to price people away from the railway than actually grow it.

A true fares trial would have tested this theory (and others) too in detail.

 

[HamworthyGoods]

That's a terrible system. And the LNER "trial" doesn't even abolish the peak fare, it abolishes the off-peak one.

It might abolish the off-peak fare but delivers the desire to remove separate peak pricing.

 

[Manutd1999]

Good thread this, it gets to the heart of how the railway should be run. Should tickets prices be set for social good, or to maximise revenue? Should we treat everyone and all journeys equally, or try to price based on demand? Should it be a top-down national system, or more flexible and regional? Should we allow trains to be overcrowded, or demand reservations?

Personally I'd go for different solutions for different types of journey:

Suburban (eg, Rochdale-Manchester)
Flat or zonal fares. No peak/off-peak and no reservations. Devolved to city regions and integrated with other transport where feasible.

(Inter)-Regional (eg, Rochdale-Leeds, Manchester-York)
Simple Anytime fares, no advances. Optional seat reservations where rolling stock suits.

Select InterCity Pairs (Manchester-London)
Advance only, dynamically priced based on real-time demand levels of individual services, with flexible tickets available for a supplement (ie, LNER style, but with more reasonably priced flexible tickets). Seat reservations mandatory.

In rare cases, multiple approaches could apply to the same train service. So Avanti from Manchester-London would be advance only with mandatory reservations, but Anytime tickets would be available for passengers travelling Manchester-Stoke on the same train (without seat reservations). This introduces a possible loophole where split-ticketing could string together a series of Anytime tickets to cover an InterCity journey, although I would expect the advances to be cheaper in most cases.

 

[willt]

My car can transport 4 people 450 miles for £120 in Petrol, tyres and depreciation. It’s almost impossible to find 4 single tickets for £30 from Edinburgh or Glasgow to London without months of notice. Last time I tried to take the train I looked two weeks in advance and it was going to cost me ~£800 for a return ticket for my family so we had to drive, unfortunately. Rail travel needs to be competitive with driving to get people to switch.

 

[HSTEd]

A railway that can be cost competitive with driving is likely to be very different from today's railway.

You'd have to chase volume and bulk to the exclusion of almost all else.

 

[yorksrob]

The vast majority of passengers don't agree with you - by far the biggest complaint on the railway is overcrowding. While I support walk-up fares I don't even agree with you - serious overcrowding (as distinct from a couple of standees in each vestibule) seriously impacts upon the quality of a journey and we really should not be setting up a fares system that will encourage that to happen.

I assume you are relatively young and fully able bodied?

In practice we couldn't do a serious price dump to fares if we didn't also do enforced compulsory reservation, maybe with a 5-10% counted place quota above the actual seats, to keep things within some level of reason. I'd rather slightly higher fares (i.e. fares as they are now outside of the LNER trial) than any of that.

However, off peak fares allow you to go to the pub for an hour and try a later train, so I have no time whatsoever for the "we have to abolish off peak fares to deal with overcrowding" argument. Your elderly person who can't stand for a long time has alternative options.

== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: 18 May 2026 ==

Which, the LNER one? No, we don't, though there are suggestions that it is roughly revenue neutral around the place. But if they cut the Anytime fares it isn't really conceivable that it would be anything other than revenue negative.

Maybe, but if its revenue neutral, its also an argument not to go for the worst possible option - the fares trial.

 

[The exile]

Would that be a significant problem since most people, if they had a choice, wouldn't travel at peak times anyway? It would just be less of a complication for those situations when such travel was unavoidable.

The definition of peak times is “when most people travel”. COVID and WFH has made that definition a bit less clear.
Because of the high peak fares, morning Peak hour travellers are either a) season ticket holders who can in theory travel at any time or b) those who have no choice. With the exception of those for whom money is no object, everyone who can avoid peak travel will do so - so any relaxation can only make peak time overcrowding worse.

 

[yorksrob]

Good thread this, it gets to the heart of how the railway should be run. Should tickets prices be set for social good, or to maximise revenue? Should we treat everyone and all journeys equally, or try to price based on demand? Should it be a top-down national system, or more flexible and regional? Should we allow trains to be overcrowded, or demand reservations?

Personally I'd go for different solutions for different types of journey:

Suburban (eg, Rochdale-Manchester)
Flat or zonal fares. No peak/off-peak and no reservations. Devolved to city regions and integrated with other transport where feasible.

(Inter)-Regional (eg, Rochdale-Leeds, Manchester-York)
Simple Anytime fares, no advances. Optional seat reservations where rolling stock suits.

Select InterCity Pairs (Manchester-London)
Advance only, dynamically priced based on real-time demand levels of individual services, with flexible tickets available for a supplement (ie, LNER style, but with more reasonably priced flexible tickets). Seat reservations mandatory.

In rare cases, multiple approaches could apply to the same train service. So Avanti from Manchester-London would be advance only with mandatory reservations, but Anytime tickets would be available for passengers travelling Manchester-Stoke on the same train (without seat reservations). This introduces a possible loophole where split-ticketing could string together a series of Anytime tickets to cover an InterCity journey, although I would expect the advances to be cheaper in most cases.

We can tinker with the deckchairs all we like. The fundamental issue is that if you take into account railcards, climate tickets, advanced purchase, bahncards etc, mile for mile train travel is too expensive in this country - particularly when compared to most of our continental neighbours. This is because the Establishment have access to motor transport and see the passenger railway as a nice to have, rather than a day to day necessity.

 

[The exile]

When were these premium fares for peak travel introduced? In my younger days there was a standard fare and a few discounted fares like cheap day returns..

They weren’t - the things that were introduced were the various discounted rates - we’ve just slowly come to see the discounted tickets as the “norm”.

 

[yorksrob]

They weren’t - the things that were introduced were the various discounted rates - we’ve just slowly come to see the discounted tickets as the “norm”.

Off-peak's been around for donkeys years though. Peak fares in a lot of instances seem to have been allowed to get out of control, mainly to fleece business travellers with expense accounts.

 

[andy33gmail]

My car can transport 4 people 450 miles for £120 in Petrol, tyres and depreciation. It’s almost impossible to find 4 single tickets for £30 from Edinburgh or Glasgow to London without months of notice. Last time I tried to take the train I looked two weeks in advance and it was going to cost me ~£800 for a return ticket for my family so we had to drive, unfortunately. Rail travel needs to be competitive with driving to get people to switch.

To me the question is *why* it’s set up this way.

For a couple of hundred a year, you can pay for access to a network of roads connecting every building in the country. That’s clearly “loss making”, paid for by general taxation

Whereas whilst rail is subsidised, it’s still not done to the same extreme. The equivalent would be to un-beech every village, make open access free, then add capacity when people complain about congestion

 

[JamesT]

To me the question is *why* it’s set up this way.

For a couple of hundred a year, you can pay for access to a network of roads connecting every building in the country. That’s clearly “loss making”, paid for by general taxation

Whereas whilst rail is subsidised, it’s still not done to the same extreme. The equivalent would be to un-beech every village, make open access free, then add capacity when people complain about congestion

You’ll need to show your working with that. Direct taxation of motorists is of the order of £30-35 billion per year. Road maintenance is around £10-12 billion. To get that the roads are subsidised you have to pull in lots of other things and assign them to roads.

The question is why are the railways so expensive to maintain? Network Rail spend around £6 billion a year on ten thousand miles of track, the GB road network is 25 times bigger but only twice as much to maintain.

 

[Bletchleyite]

The question is why are the railways so expensive to maintain? Network Rail spend around £6 billion a year on ten thousand miles of track, the GB road network is 25 times bigger but only twice as much to maintain.

The relative standard of maintenance of the two might at least partly compensate. We would close a railway for safety reasons if it was in such poor condition as many roads.

 

[RT4038]

The relative standard of maintenance of the two might at least partly compensate. We would close a railway for safety reasons if it was in such poor condition as many roads.

Road vehicles are able to safely negotiate roads maintained to a far lower standard than trains on railways. The proliferation of SUVs makes that all the more so!

 

[andy33gmail]

You’ll need to show your working with that. Direct taxation of motorists is of the order of £30-35 billion per year.

Expensive when you factor in fuel duty, sure. But the barrier to entry is really low; Cost of VED (and tax on insurance premiums etc)

Trying to be a bit more apples for apples than my first claim - I could get a bus license, buy a bus off eBay, get some insurance, and set up “Andy’s Cheap and Nasty Bus Co” .

A private individual would find it much harder to do the same with rail - for example Oxford to MK. Although I appreciate examples do exist (Lumo, and the random guy in Brussels who bought some 50 year old sleeper trains from a scrap yard)

 

[Bletchleyite]

Road vehicles are able to safely negotiate roads maintained to a far lower standard than trains on railways. The proliferation of SUVs makes that all the more so!

Certainly, and that may genuinely justify the difference in spending. But my point stands that one reason roads are cheaper to maintain than rail is that they are maintained to a MUCH lower standard.

 

[RT4038]

Certainly, and that may genuinely justify the difference in spending. But my point stands that one reason roads are cheaper to maintain than rail is that they are maintained to a MUCH lower standard.

Quite so. Not only to a lower standard, but a much less precise need (tar vs. intricate pointwork, or traffic lights vs. complex signalling for instance).

 

[andy33gmail]

Certainly, and that may genuinely justify the difference in spending. But my point stands that one reason roads are cheaper to maintain than rail is that they are maintained to a MUCH lower standard.

Trains can safely do 100mph on much of the network.

I’d argue cars should be able to too, but it would be objectively be many times more deaths per mile & a majority of people agree it should remain illegal

 

[quantinghome]

Whereas whilst rail is subsidised, it’s still not done to the same extreme.

I doubt that's the case. Overall, operational railway funding is about a 50/50 split between the taxpayer and passengers - approx. £12bn each. Which is about the same amount of money spent on road maintenance. Bear in mind rail accounts for around 10% of journeys measured by passenger-km.

The question is why are the railways so expensive to maintain? Network Rail spend around £6 billion a year on ten thousand miles of track, the GB road network is 25 times bigger but only twice as much to maintain.

Certainly, and that may genuinely justify the difference in spending. But my point stands that one reason roads are cheaper to maintain than rail is that they are maintained to a MUCH lower standard.

The engineering standards required are much higher for a railway. Rails need to be kept within strict dimensional tolerances more associated with mechanical than civil engineering. Railways are essentially a giant linear machine, especially when it comes to pointwork and so on. Roads don't need anything like that level of inspection, maintenance and renewal. Even a well-maintained road wouldn't require the same maintenance budget as a railway mile-for-mile. It's very rare for a road to require a complete carriageway rebuild - resurfacing is the only thing needed in the vast majority of cases.

Other reasons the comparison is apples and oranges:

- Most of the UK road network is the equivalent of sidings and slow rural branch lines. Only around 20% of the road network are M, A or B roads, which is where the vast majority of maintenance spend goes. So rather than the road network being 25 times bigger, a sensible equivalent would be 'only' 5 times.
- Railways require shallow gradients so need more intensive use of civil engineering structures, be that tunnels, viaducts, bridges, earthworks. This significantly increases maintenance costs.
- Not only are the UK railway's engineering structures more intensive, they are typically 100 years older than equivalent road structures and built to much less conservative engineering standards. For example, a typical motorway cutting has a 1 in 3 batter slope, railways are typically less than 1 in 2. So the chances of failure are much higher, as are the consequences of failure.
- Roads don't need a complex signalling system.

 

[The exile]

The question is why are the railways so expensive to maintain? Network Rail spend around £6 billion a year on ten thousand miles of track, the GB road network is 25 times bigger but only twice as much to maintain.

I suspect there is a huge time-bomb ticking on the M-Way network in the form of concrete structures at the end of their natural life. What’s more, they’re all going to get there within a relatively concentrated period of time.

 

[Bletchleyite]

I suspect there is a huge time-bomb ticking on the M-Way network in the form of concrete structures at the end of their natural life. What’s more, they’re all going to get there within a relatively concentrated period of time.

New thread: https://www.railforums.co.uk/thread...ructures-on-motorways-and-major-roads.302288/

 

[Tetchytyke]

The question is why are the railways so expensive to maintain?

I would have thought that would be obvious.

A small pothole on a main road is annoying. If it is a really bad pothole and you are unlucky in how you hit it, you might get a puncture or you might, worst case scenario, damage your suspension or your steering arm.

The equivalent of a small pothole on a railway line would see an express train flying off into the scenery at a very high speed.

 

[Bletchleyite]

I suppose a small pothole is like a dipped joint on a branch line which might just get a 5mph TSR put on it. But we have them on high speed motorways...