Trains

British trains are what I might call daft.


If you are not British, or are British but poor at geography, I refer you at this point to a map of the United Kingdom.

I paid, with a Young Person’s railcard, £9.90 three weeks in advance to travel from Wolverhampton to London Euston. This journey took, on a Sunday, one hour and fifty-two minutes and was perfectly on time, enabling me to undertake my wander around London before catching a train to take me to Surbiton from London Waterloo later that afternoon.

At the same time as buying that ticket, I bought a ticket for a journey from London Kings Cross to Hexham (just a little while west of Newcastle). This cost me £33.25, and was a good price, especially as I was rocketed from London to Newcastle in two hours and fifty-two minutes, not stopping once between London and York.

Also as I bought that ticket, I tried for another from Hexham to Wolverhampton, changing at Newcastle . Astonishingly, every train company wanted to charge me around £55. So, being the ever-so crafty being that I am, I got myself a ticket from Hexham to Newcastle for a couple of quid, and investigated the cost of travelling to Birmingham New Street from Newcastle, as I was going to change there anyway. £19.15. I will pause for a moment to let that sink in. Yes, apparently to the train companies, the two short journeys either side of the main Newcastle-to-Birmingham stretch, which in total would cost me a few, maybe six or seven, British pounds, were worth about £35.

This is not all that astonishes me. As I'm writing this, I’m sitting on this main train now, somewhere between Sheffield and Derby, and I have been here two hours and ten minutes. In forty more, I will make it to Birmingham. I got from London to Newcastle in that time. Birmingham is not nearly as far away from Newcastle as London.

I leave you to digest all this and attempt (and fail) to make sense of it.