Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon Calder. It's Thursday the 14th of September.

There's some stories that I really enjoy writing, including one I did last night called, well headlined, train operator Scott Rail, Sc Rail scraps peak tickets in six-month trial.

Savings for rush hour travellers range from 20 to 48%. Well, yes, and this is the story that

peak fairs are to be abolished for the winter, starting on the 2nd of October, by Scott Rail.

The idea is, says the operator they're

hoping to encourage people to ditch the car and travel by train. And a number of people have

got in touch and said, well, this sounds like a fantastic idea. Why don't we do it in the rest

of the country? And that's what I am looking at today.

So first of all, let me explain about peak fares.

In a sense, they used to be the only fares if you trace back when, for an awful lot of the time on the railways,

the norm has been that you pay the standard peak fare.

It's only relatively recently that we have seen a lot of off-peak fairs coming, particularly for longer journeys.

There's been a bit of a tradition for many, many decades that if you travel

after typically half past nine in the morning, you'll get a cheaper deal if you avoid the evening

rush hour as well. And the idea is very simply, too many people want to travel during the rush

hour, not enough people want to travel during the rest of the day.

So what do you do? You incentivise them with cheaper fares, which is, I guess, a perfectly straightforward idea.

It's pretty unsophisticated in that there is this cliff edge.

And as I see this repeatedly particularly on kind of

evening trains from central London terminal stations going to the north and the west where

suddenly after seven o'clock every single train is rammed because people have been waiting around

to get the

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