Trains
As you may or may not have gathered from the last post, we now live in Ledbury. Ledbury is quite a nice little town and we live close enough to the centre that we can walk in from here. As Ledbury is lucky enough to still have a train station, when we went out on Saturday night in Hereford I thought it would be fun to go on the train. I like trains. I don’t know if it comes from the sort of person I am – a computery person that gives me an interest in the inner workings of things and the “golden age” of steam, but hey, I like trains. Kate will attest to my excitment when we got to on a Pendolino last year. As usual, the actual going on the train came nowhere near to my obviously ludricous ideas of a train service.
First off, the train was 20 minutes late and disappeared from the information board a few times before it actually appeared. Not a good way to instill confidence in the users of the service. Once we were on the train, it got worse. At least, to begin with I thought it was going well. The conductor came through and sold us our tickets, which I heard him say cost 70p each. This amount did seem cheap to me, but not unreasonable for the 15 mile Ledbury to Hereford journey, return. I hand him £1.40 and he looks at me. It turns out that it was £4.70 each. A total of £9.40 for the pair of us.
Consider that for a moment. A 15 mile journey. The bus service from Ledbury to Hereford that runs on time costs £3.00 each return, the car would have cost, I reckon £5 tops if you take account of wear and tear. The train costs nearly twice the price! How on earth the government expects to ever get anyone off the road onto those rip-off merchants I will never know. Of course, they’re quite happy to spend £25 billion pounds on bloody useless atomic weapons (and they really are useless, for they have no use) but they’d rather make the roads more expensive then doing anything with our waste of space rail network.
It really makes me furious. I would absolutely love to use the train regularly, but you can’t even trust the information boards half the time – imagine if I turned up a few minutes late, when the information was missing from the board. I’d have gone home again thinking there wasn’t another train for nearly an hour. Why can’t they do anything right?
Oh and I also found out that the conductor lined Great Western’s pockets a little more by charging us for a standard day return when he could have given us an cheap evening return for £3.50. In combination with a young persons railcard that would have brought us to a far more reasonable £4.80 ish for the pair of us.
Tags: trains
Trains are great if you’re on your own (and you’re going far enough that buses aren’t an option). As soon as you get even two people, car sharing becomes an option. We had 4 of us go to Middlesbrough and it was 70p more each to hire a car than take the train. Silly.
Maybe there should be a social networking site where people can put what journey’s their planning to make and they can share lifts and save a bundle of cash…