April 22nd - The Great Rail Row
Simon Calder's Independent Travel Podcast
The Independent
3.6 • 628 Ratings
🗓️ 22 April 2022
⏱️ 8 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Today I'm discussing the context around the mayor of Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham's tweet showing high-end train tickets from Manchester to London to be more expensive than a range of long-haul air fares. Train tickets are indeed too expensive, but what should be done about it?
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to the final independent travel podcast of the week coming to you from |
| 0:06.4 | the independent with me Simon Calder. Well, it's been a bit of a spat going on on Twitter. You |
| 0:15.4 | will not be surprised to learn. But it's got an odd origin. |
| 0:22.0 | This morning, kind of completely out of the blue. |
| 0:24.8 | The Mayor of Greater Manchester put out a tweet. |
| 0:28.4 | This is Andy Burnham. |
| 0:30.3 | He said return tickets from Manchester. |
| 0:32.6 | India, £343. |
| 0:34.8 | Jamaica, $345. |
| 0:36.8 | Brazil, mm, 320. Ivory Coast, $3 pounds. Jamaica, 345, Brazil, 325, Ivory Coast, 319. Those are all great prices. |
| 0:43.9 | Then he says, London, brackets, rail, 369 pounds. Just as I look at this, 76,000 people have liked his tweet, and 13,000 people have retweeted it. |
| 1:00.2 | So clearly, there is a huge interest in this. |
| 1:04.7 | Now, once I had a look at it, I thought, well, yes, it's extraordinary how low some airfares are. It's also extraordinary |
| 1:12.9 | how high that London return fare is. It's the sort of price, 3659 pounds 40 actually, is what it |
| 1:22.5 | really is, that only somebody who wasn't paying for it would pay, if you see what I mean. |
| 1:29.3 | It's a business fair. |
| 1:31.2 | It's the absolute any time, do what you like, stop any way you want to along the way, |
| 1:37.4 | get a refund if you want to change your plans standard class ticket. |
| 1:42.5 | The first class one, by the way, is even higher. And so I was |
| 1:47.5 | really interested in his choice of fares. So I dare say there is a time, a place, a ticket, |
| 1:57.9 | where you can get out to India for 343 pounds. It might well have a number of kind of slightly |
| 2:04.1 | tricky changes. Same goes for maybe the Ivory Coast. Brazil and Jamaica, well, low 300s, those are |
... |
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