May 1st - Grand Central journey: we need to talk about pricing
Simon Calder's Independent Travel Podcast
The Independent
3.6 • 628 Ratings
🗓️ 1 May 2025
⏱️ 6 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
I'm aboard the 8.26am from London to Sunderland, run by "open access" train operator Grand Central. My ticket cost £42. Grand Central had to pay around £2 in commission to rival LNER, with whom I chose to book because of a cashback offer.
I think train operators should behave more like budget airlines.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome on 4826 Grand Sample Service to Sundalong, |
| 0:04.3 | Colner, Peterborough, York, Thirsk, North Allerton, Eagles, |
| 0:07.4 | the Putford Pool and then, suddenly where would you arrive, |
| 0:11.0 | just after 12 o'clock this afternoon? |
| 0:13.2 | Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon Corder. |
| 0:18.7 | It's Thursday the 1st of May and happy May Day to you. |
| 0:23.9 | Yes, as you can guess, I'm on a train yet again. But this one is a little bit different. |
| 0:30.5 | I'm on the East Coast mainline travelling at 125 miles an hour towards Peterborough, then York and into County Durham. But I am not on board |
| 0:42.3 | an L-N-E-R- Express train. I'm on Grand Central. That is a train company which runs from London |
| 0:50.6 | Kings Cross to both West Yorkshire and also in this case to Sunderland. |
| 0:56.8 | It's an open access operator. |
| 0:59.8 | That means that it doesn't receive any subsidy from the government. |
| 1:05.1 | It does pay something towards the use of the tracks, quite a lot, in fact the operators would say, |
| 1:10.3 | and it is purely a commercial |
| 1:12.5 | undertaking that is designed to increase the connectivity particularly for places like west |
| 1:20.5 | yorkshire and county durham which wouldn't have much otherwise and also to provide a bit of |
| 1:25.5 | competition and improve things for the |
| 1:27.9 | traveller and I'm delighted to have got my ticket just over 40 pounds which I |
| 1:33.8 | think is a pretty good deal certainly cheaper than L NER which would also |
| 1:39.7 | require a change of trains but there's some weird things going on here. I celebrate competition, |
| 1:48.5 | and that is why, for example, we have such extraordinarily low fares, high quality, frequent |
| 1:55.3 | opportunities to travel on the budget airlines, but it strikes me that the rail industry hasn't yet got things right. |
... |
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