Ticket to hell

Somehow, this story is both unbelievable and all too believable. The other week, a football fan from Newcastle was planning to take his girlfriend to watch his team play at Oxford. To save money, he decided that, rather than buy return tickets, he would buy a sequence of discounted tickets for individual stages of the journey.

He managed it, too. Know how many tickets he ordered? Fifty-six.

That’s how barmy train ticketing is in this country. This man sat on the same trains from Newcastle to Oxford, and from Oxford to Newcastle, as the passengers who’d bought a normal return. But he paid less than they did. The only catch: he had to carry a pile of tickets thicker than a deck of playing cards.

Little wonder, then, that the Office of Rail and Road – the rail regulator – has now found that a fifth of passengers buy the wrong ticket from station ticket machines. There’s so much unnecessary choice, so many bewilderingly named tickets at bewilderingly different prices, that passengers don’t know which to pick. This is a pain not only the confused, but for the non-confused who are having to queue, at frustrating length, behind them.

There’s nothing else for it. We’re going to have to make the use of train ticket machines a compulsory subject in schools.

It should be a branch of advanced mathematics.