Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast is Monday the 12th of June.

Where is time disappearing to?

I mean 10 days from now, if you're in the northern hemisphere, of course, the nights will be drawing in.

But let's forget all of that and concentrate on the great rail revolution which appears to be

underway although they seem to be also going past my house and this is all about single leg pricing

why is it important well because at the moment there is just this utter shambles of fares.

Basically, let's take one particular fare type, the off-peak return.

That was introduced as a result of the British Rail Organisation finally thinking,

oh, we could probably do with a few more passengers on our trains.

What if we cut the fares?

So they brought in the, well, it was originally known as a saver return,

absolutely revolutionary in the 1980s.

Then, people who were travelling at vaguely off-peak times,

but only going in one direction

were sometimes sold by kind ticket stuff because of course you weren't going to buy anything on the internet

at that stage they were sold these off-peak returns and that led to confusion so people would

be cross and say hang on you just sold me a return. I'm only going

one way. And the patient station booking staff would say, yes, we know that, but this is going to be

in your interests. It's cheaper. Eventually, British Rail said, okay, what we're going to do is we're

going to have an off-peak single as well, but it's only going to be a pound cheaper

than the off-peak return. And even though that was four decades ago, things haven't really moved on

very far, even though, of course, the booking of train tickets these days is mostly done online.

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