Britain's trains: A ridiculous state of fares

The Man Who Pays His Way: The curious case of the Crewe season ticket will Stoke confusion about rail prices

Simon Calder muses over the state of Britain's train fares

Are you, or have you ever been, a rail season-ticket holder? If the answer is “yes”, then you will already know the freedom they bestow (unless it’s for a Southern journey, which mainly provides the freedom not to get to work/school/hospital, etc).

A one-week season ticket from Crewe to Milton Keynes, for example, does far more than just entitle you to shuttle as frequently as you wish between those two great metropoles on the main Trent Valley route across Staffordshire and Warwickshire.

Yet the same ticket, costing £172.50, also allows you to travel between them on “Any Permitted Route” – a railway term of immense complexity, but which in this context translates approximately as “going basically in the right direction”.

From the traveller’s perspective, this opens a wealth of possibilities. Interested in design? The Northampton legal loop leads to 78 Derngate, Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s transformation of a Georgian home. Or stop off at Wedgwood in the Potteries; the tourist attraction that celebrates the legacy of Josiah Wedgwood has a station adjacent, though annoyingly it is currently closed; Stone is the nearest.

For spiritual routes, cathedrals are well represented, with Coventry and Lichfield notable. And from Birmingham you can take any of the three lines that fan out from New Street station to Tamworth, Lichfield and Rugeley.

Yet the most tempting reason to buy that Crewe-Milton Keynes season ticket is to save money on a peak-time day trip. Not between Crewe and Milton Keynes, but between Stoke and London.

As I revealed this week, the best way to get a cheap deal between Stoke and the capital is to buy the aforementioned season ticket together with a return between Milton Keynes and London Euston. Unlike traditional “split tickets”, with a season there is no obligation to travel on a train that stops at the point where the ticket is split. So you can race through Milton Keynes Central at 125mph, which a churlish person might say is the ideal way to view the middle-aged new town.

But I felt I should at least test out the 100-mile journey from Stoke to Milton Keynes, which Virgin Trains schedules for a blistering 56 minutes.

The journey begins at a handsome station rich in light and heritage, which also occupies a strange location on the railway space-time continuum. An Anytime return from Stoke (valid, of course, for only one round trip), is more expensive than an all-you-can-eat seven-day season from Crewe, even though Stoke is 10 minutes nearer lovely Milton Keynes than is Crewe.

Initially the line parallels the River Trent, and meets the line from Stafford at Colwich – where a trackside garden is dedicated to the driver who died when his express train from Liverpool collided with a Manchester-bound train in 1986.

Shortly after the Trent meandered off towards Burton, Nottingham and the Humber, the train’s tilting mechanism came into its own through the curves around Lichfield. But then things started going awry. Between Tamworth and Polesworth, we were ignominiously overtaken by another Virgin Train speeding to London much faster than us. We stayed on the slow line, and a few minutes later another southbound service raced past. And somewhere outside Nuneaton. the train shuddered to a halt in the drizzle, so we could take a good look at the back gardens and light engineering facilities while yet another 125mph train roared past.

I tried to find out from the on-board wi-fi, for which I had paid £5, what was happening with the train. But with a neat twist of irony the wi-fi is so poor that you cannot consult the internet to find out why your train is late.

On my third attempt to get online, as the train accelerated through Rugby, the system worked. We would be arriving at Milton Keynes, the National Rail Enquiries site promised, on time. An impressive prediction: there were just seven minutes to cover the 35 miles, which required us to travel at 300mph. As was the train kept within the legal limit and arrived 11 minutes late.

The unexplained delay would have annoyed someone who had paid £176 return for the privilege of a trip between Stoke and Milton Keynes. Luckily, there's never any need to spend so much. Which sums up the ridiculous state of fares on Britain’s railways.