People never get rich on book tours, I’ve quickly learned, as speaking fees are eaten up by the cost of motorway service station meals and hotel stays made necessary by evening appearances hundreds of miles from home. But I hadn’t appreciated just how expensive – or difficult – taking my new book around the country would be.
For years, I would take the train down the East Coast mainline from Newcastle, where I live, to London to meet professional contacts for a few days of networking at a time. Occasionally, due to mechanical failure or other holdups, that three-hour journey would become four, five or six.
Then, post-Covid, inflation drove costs up, and the trains became more unreliable – coupled with strikes – all of which means I now dread travelling anywhere by train. I seek out alternatives wherever I can, which is why I’m currently writing this from the departure lounge at Newcastle airport before a flight to Heathrow, rather than chancing it on a too-expensive, too-delayed, too-busy train.
I’m not the only one: a recent Ipsos survey suggests four in 10 of us think the railways are providing a “poor” service and 45 per cent said they’d avoided rail in favour of another form of transport over concerns about services running. Social media frequently features complaints from customers and screenshots of high prices (one recent example, that I haven’t verified myself, appeared to show an LNER return from Newcastle to London listed at £786.80 – the cheapest first class ticket was £1,049).
Even with the cost of my Metro journey to the airport in Newcastle, and the Tube at the other end from Heathrow to central London, the £75 cost of flying British Airways for the 250-mile journey was commensurate with the cost of an LNER train.
I am chancing the return journey on a train, but deliberately booked a lunchtime service so that in the likelihood that there’s a delay – just 57 per cent of LNER services were classed as “on time” in the last year, according to the Office for Rail Regulation – I’m still likely to make evening meetings I have planned. That single journey cost about as much as the equivalent flight. (Update: the train was 40 minutes late).
I’m far from alone: I met my friend last week in Newcastle, who got a coach down from Edinburgh rather than a train because it was both cheaper and he figured, more reliable, with the 45 minutes of additional bus journey time likely to be cancelled out by train delays. He also mentioned how his partner – a university lecturer – would often be delayed for hours on end while travelling to and from the north west of England on her regular commute.
My parents have stopped taking trains for holidays in the UK, instead choosing to use coach trips as a way to travel the country. It’s the same reason that I chose to drive to the Cotswolds for an event earlier this month rather than take the train.
I’m about to book a journey involving flying and hiring a car to travel to the West Sussex town of Cuckfield as even that will be cheaper and far quicker than the equivalent train journey would be – even accounting for sitting in departure lounges and queueing for security (the recent change by Newcastle airport to install modern scanners that don’t require removing liquids has also helped reduce travel friction).
We talk a lot about “broken Britain”, but my conversion into a train travel naysayer is a personal example of how much I think things have degraded. There was a time, five or six years ago, when I could tell you all about the best ways to make tight train connections or navigate the Delay Repay system. I used to rely on the railways. And now I don’t – because I can’t.
A lack of punctuality – only 62.2 per cent of trains across Britain stopped at stations “on time” in the last three months of 2023, according to the Office for Rail Regulation, while one in 20 were cancelled – would be forgivable if it was cheap. But it’s often just as, or more, affordable to fly.
And unlike trains, where you can stop for hours in the middle of nowhere, planes are held up at airports, where you can at least find a seat, stretch your legs, and grab some food, which would be a rare pleasure on trains, where food trolleys often can’t navigate the aisles due to overcrowding, making it more like a hamster cage.
Christian Wolmar, a train industry commentator, tells me: “Generally, we’ve suffered from a lot of industrial action and some unreliability.
“I think industrial action, regular strikes every couple of months, and overtime bans and the like, have somewhat changed the perception of the railways from something that is broadly reliable to broadly unreliable.”
Blaming privatisation for the fact things have got worse is too simplistic, says Wolmar. “There have been good periods and bad periods.” Wolmar believes we’re in a bad period at present, with the tone set by the government’s unwillingness to meet unions to try and reach an agreement over disruption to the rail network. He points to Rishi Sunak’s reliance on helicopters to travel short journeys that could be done by train as an example of the government leading by example in suggesting train travel isn’t the first choice. “Nobody’s actually got much focus on the railways,” he said. “The government is not interested.”
Although he thinks customer perception of them being entirely unreliable is unfair to an extent: the last dozen or so train journeys he’s taken have had no problem. “It’s a perception problem.” And he’s keen that I don’t forswear train travel altogether. “Most of the time, most journeys are okay, and it’s still a very good way to travel,” he said.
How does he suggest I should be doing it then for a smoother experience? “There are still cheaper deals that can be obtained if you book in advance, but LNER has messed up the pricing on that route,” he concedes. “LNER has previously said its ‘simpler fares pilot scheme’ is designed to make ticket pricing less confusing, and would ‘encourage more people to choose travel by rail’.
“To be honest, once we get a new government, I think that perceptions will change back,” he said. “I think because the Labour party is saying they’re going to take back the franchises in-house, there’ll be a lot invested in ensuring that they don’t mess up.”
For now, I’ve still only made plans to fly. I’ll be doing the same Newcastle-Heathrow trip again in early June, travelling in and out of London the same day. I really do want to be a train user again, but I need them to be more reliable, and if they could make the prices on par with taking a plane, too, I’ll start to consider it.