Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon Calder.

It's Tuesday the 18th of February. I'm back at a railway station.

This particular one is London Paddington, the beautiful hub for the great Western railway

from here to South Wales and the west of England.

The flagship route from here is the one that goes west to Bristol Temple Meads.

And I'm just close to Platform 4 where the 9 o'clock train to Bristol is preparing to depart.

If you want to travel on it, you've got to have a ticket.

About the most foolish thing you could ever do is buy a ticket from London to Bristol Temple Meads

because it is almost always cheaper to split your ticket.

That means that you will buy a ticket from here to Digcott Parkway where the train stops.

You don't need to get off and on again, but you have also got a separate ticket from Digcott Parkway where the train stops. You don't need to get off and on again,

but you have also got a separate ticket from Digcott Parkway to Bristol Temple Meese.

This happens because of the absolutely medieval fares system that is in place,

which means that there's all kinds of an nominees, of which this one is the most extreme,

you would save £57 by doing that, unless, actually, you booked it on train line,

at which point you would only save £54 and £21.

I've been looking at train line because something caught my eye at a different

London station, Kings Cross, big poster saying you won't find cheaper tickets anywhere else. In smaller

letters underneath, they say, or will refund the difference. But the headline pledge that you

won't find cheaper tickets anywhere else is absolutely baffling because on

about one third of transactions train line charges a fee up to £2.79, 4% on some tickets.

Trainline already earns 5% for online sales, as does anybody else.

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