Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me, Simon Calder. It's Wednesday the 21st of August.

And as you may have detected, I'm back at London Kings Cross Station there's a couple of

very important fares stories to talk to you about the first one is all about the

Scott Rail Peak Fairs removal trial you might remember that last October ScotRail said we are going to abolish all peak fairs.

That had the effect of nearly halving an awful lot of prices during the morning and evening peak.

It was particularly valuable in reducing the cost of shuttling between

Edinburgh and Glasgow. Well, we have now heard that that is coming to an end after possibly

having influenced a small number of people in moving from road to rail, but also having cost up to 40 million pounds in

subsidies. It's a brave effort, one which I think it's interesting to study the detail of,

but ultimately, as unfortunately was rather predicted at the time,

the main people who benefited were, I guess, middle-off to high-income people who commute

generally between Edinburgh and Glasgow. They suddenly found that the cost of their journeys

had almost halved and that was a great

benefit to them. Effectively the taxpayer was subsidising their journeys or at least handing them

back a wadge of cash. In order for the scheme to work, the basic principle is that you would need to increase 10% the modal share of rail.

In other words, nearing people away out of their cars and onto trains.

The best that anybody can say is that it actually increased demand by 6.8% and quoting the report,

a more negative view suggesting the impact was instead around 2.4%.

So it's a brave experiment which is going nowhere it continues until pretty much the end of

September and then there's all sorts of things which are being put into place in particular

reducing the cost of season tickets which will slightly soften the blow but one of those things

where a lot of people will have saved quite a lot of money

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