More Trains…

I spent around 3 hours a day on trains, plus the occasional weekend journey. So humour me while I write another post about them.

I had a lovely weekend visiting my neice and nephew. Reluctantly, it was time to go home so I got dropped off at the station only to find it was a replacement bus to Milton Keynes at 17.18

The timetable I’d printed only a week before had the departure as a train direct to London at 16.56, so I had an extra 20 minutes wait, plus a slower journey and extra, inconvenient change. I might not have bothered going to Northampton at all if I’d known. The online timetable is supposed to have all this info up-to-date.

Which got me thinking… why do we still have to pay for tickets, if we then turn up and it’s a bus? If I wanted to catch the bus from A to B, I’d use National Express or buy a cheap bus fare. We pay a premium for fast, flexible, comfortable and direct train services.

If the train companies were forced to make the replacement buses entirely free of charge, and were forced to refund that portion of the fare for every ticket holder (at the time of travel or later on application), then maybe we’d see less of them.

Not only would it discourage “late-running” engineering, but it would also stop companies from putting on buses which they allegedly wish to run-down, claim there’s no call for and then scrap.