We need to talk about rail fares ... and this is a good time to bury bad news

They say you should never waste a crisis, so let’s not waste this one. As Simon Calder anticipates a hike in ticket prices, he says there has never been a better time to restructure the system and encourage more people onto trains

Blast from the past: it will be some time before these levels of crowding return (Getty)

At 2.56pm on 11 September 2001, an aide in the Department for Transport (DfT) sent an email to the then transport secretary, Stephen Byers, saying: “It’s now a very good day to get out anything we want to bury.” Jo Moore wrote the message within an hour of the second aircraft hitting the World Trade Centre in New York.

The notorious “good day to bury bad news” memo led to a series of resignations in the DfT and – we can but hope – reminded ministerial aides of the need to show respect for the British public and the wider world. Nearly two decades on, we are engulfed in another crisis. Many thousands of lives have been lost. And the DfT has been presented with another opportunity to bury bad news: this time about how some rail fares must rise.

The pricing structure for Britain’s trains is an impossible mess of 55 million different fares. Supposed safeguards were “baked in” during privatisation in the 1990s. Despite the online revolution, a quarter-century of government inaction has left us with paper tickets in a smartphone age, loopholes as wide as Waterloo station available for those of us who care to use them, and a sense of injustice among those who are obliged to pay more than £1 per mile for peak-time journeys.