April 19th - The Great British Rail Sale
Simon Calder's Independent Travel Podcast
The Independent
3.6 • 628 Ratings
🗓️ 19 April 2022
⏱️ 8 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
More than one million train tickets are being slashed to as much as half-price in the “Great British Rail Sale”, and it is attracting a lot of interest. The government and rail industry are hoping the sale will boost ticket sales after the impact of the pandemic. But will it work? I explore what the sale is (deeply discounted Advance rail tickets between 25 April and 27 May) and what it isn’t (a solution to the problem of attracting vast numbers of people back to the railway).
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, I'm Simon Calder, welcoming you to my independent travel podcast, bringing you the latest news on travelling, whether you're away, having the time of your life, or merely dreaming of a great escape. |
| 0:13.0 | Well, if you were kind enough to be listening yesterday, you'll know that I celebrated Waterloo Station in the heart of London, the busiest train terminus in Europe, |
| 0:24.7 | actually, in normal times. And lo and behold, today we have more reasons to celebrate the railways |
| 0:31.3 | because a great British rail sale has begun. I want to tell you today what this is and also what it isn't. |
| 0:40.5 | First, though, let me put the railways in context. Ever since privatisation in the mid-1990s, |
| 0:49.5 | the railways, right up until the start of 2020 were in an upwards trajectory. |
| 0:55.7 | Now, you can argue endlessly and people do about whether privatisation was responsible |
| 1:01.6 | or would it have happened anyway or even perhaps more spectacularly if railways had remained in private ownership. |
| 1:10.1 | Anyway, we doubled passenger numbers, lots of investment going into the railways at last. |
| 1:15.9 | And of course, as people worried more and more about the climate crisis, it was terrific |
| 1:20.2 | to see that people were moving on to the railways. |
| 1:24.4 | Then came the COVID pandemic and the British public found themselves paying |
| 1:28.2 | one million pounds an hour to keep pretty much empty trains running through the pandemic |
| 1:34.4 | for essential workers we were told. Since then, well, the numbers for the last three months |
| 1:43.1 | of 2021, which is the last period for which we have available figures, |
| 1:49.6 | suggests that compared with the pre-pandemic level, same three months in 2019, there was roughly a one-third drop-off in passenger numbers. |
| 2:00.8 | Crucially, though, there was a two-thirds drop-off in passenger numbers. Crucially, though, there was a two-thirds drop-off |
| 2:03.8 | in the use of season tickets. Of course, people working from home, celebrating the freedom |
| 2:08.8 | when they went back to the office, not to be at the office a lot of the time. This is tremendous |
| 2:15.3 | news for them individually. Who wants to be on the 515 from Waterloo |
| 2:20.6 | every evening if you don't absolutely have to? But it's terrible for the finances of the railways |
| 2:27.0 | because of course season tickets were the bedrock of revenue. We knew pretty much every year |
... |
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