Many people in the railway industry would like to do away with Split Ticketing. But once the rabbit is out of the hat, it’s difficult to capture it again. Besides, how do you manage something you can hardly measure? A vast amount of split tickets are not purchased together, and on the train a passenger is only obliged to show the section of the journey that they are making at the time of inspection, to show they have a valid ticket for the journey being taken. It would only add to confusion of inspection staff if they were given, say, three tickets, when they only need to see one.
Split ticketing should be here to stay
You can compare getting rid of split ticket anomalies to that arcade game where you bash a plastic mole with a hammer as soon as it pops up, and when you bash it down another three pop up together. For every anomaly resolved, another one appears, and there are often unintended consequences of simplification. As I have always said, every type of ticket represents a bargain for somebody, and every attempt to reduce the number of fares between A and B removes the best fare available for some particular passenger. Suppose there are three fares: £10, £20 and £30 between two stations. If you remove the £20 one, the passengers paying £20 will have to pay £30 instead. Two fares instead of three, but the passengers paying the middle fare end up paying the top price. (If those passengers could pay £10 instead, revenue would plummet and there would be no need for the £20 fare to exist at all.)
Five years ago it was my father’s 85th birthday. He lives in Kent, and I was going down to Poole (POO) in Dorset that afternoon. We agreed to have lunch in a pub near his home, and I said to him to choose a pub anywhere as long as there was a railway station nearby, He agreed to think about it. Three weeks before the birthday lunch, I bought an advance purchase single from Clapham Junction (CLJ, where many lines to the south of London cross over) to POO for a bargain price from my local station at Chester-le-Street in Co. Durham).
There’s nothing wrong with it and it’s undetectable
Come his birthday, my Dad decided he would like to go to Oxted (OXT) in Surrey, about seven miles from his home, for his birthday lunch. We enjoyed a leisurely lunch and afterwards I walked to the station and bought a single ticket from OXT to CLJ. Had I not bought the ticket to Poole from Clapham Junction in advance, it would have cost me far more on the day. But here’s the point: I had two tickets for a journey from OXT to POO, split at CLJ. Apart from me, no-one would know that the person buying an advance purchase single three weeks ahead from CLJ to POO was the very same person who bought a single on a suburban train from OXT to CLJ less than an hour before the express left Waterloo for Poole, picking me up at CLJ. There was nothing wrong with doing this, but it was completely undetectable and could hardly therefore be in some way banned. You can’t manage what you cannot measure.
You don’t have to understand the workings of the system to save money.
Just book at nationalrail.com.
