For Biraja Ghosal, traversing Britain’s rail network has been an almost-daily burden for the past nine years. The 46-year-old data scientist, from Barnet in north London, travels across the country five days a week as part of his job. He is no stranger to smelly loos, late trains or missing plug sockets – and that was just Wednesday morning.
As he stepped from Virgin’s London Euston to Manchester Piccadilly service shortly before 10am on Wednesday (cost of a single ticket: £169) Ghosal was enraged to learn that prices would be rising another 3.2% from January.
“It’s not fair, already they’re too high,” he said. In recent months, he said, his train services have “got much worse”.
Of the 12 trains due to arrive at Manchester Piccadilly at 9.45am on Wednesday, only one was running on time. A service from Newcastle was cancelled and other busy trains from London Euston, Sheffield, Nottingham and Liverpool were all late. A long queue of day-trippers formed at the information booth, below a departures board that showed delays for a number of Northern, Transpennine and East Midlands trains.
It has become a familiar story for commuters across the north of England since May, when more than 9,000 Northern Rail services were cut from the schedules after the bungled introduction of a new timetable. The entire Lakes line was closed at one point, prompting a heritage rail firm to step into the breach and offer a free service during the run-up to the holiday season.
Thousands of passengers are still waiting to receive enhanced compensation for the disruption, which George Osborne’s Northern Powerhouse thinktank believes cost the north of England’s economy at least £38m and up to £1.3m a day at the height of the crisis.
“Nationalise it,” Jack Wrigley, 69, demanded as he waited to meet friends from Yorkshire for a day out in Manchester. Northern’s owner, he pointed out, is a subsidiary of the German national railway Deutsche Bahn. “It’s crazy that we have state-owned rail firms from Europe running British services to send money back to foreign countries.”
Retired teacher Deborah Hind, 56, said she was enraged by the transport secretary Chris Grayling’s media interviews in which he said rail fares should be pegged to the lower measure of inflation if unions accept the same measure for staff pay.
“I don’t know how Grayling dares go on the radio to talk about rail fares in this terrible mess,” she said. “It’s abysmal that fares are going up when there’s such a terrible situation on the railways.”
She added: “People are losing their jobs because they’re turning up late. People can’t afford to travel on the trains. And when you get people off the trains, where do they go? They go to the roads and they increase pollution and CO2. It’s all linked.”
Waiting for a colleague in Piccadilly’s busy foyer, Tim Smith said he often used his car for work rather than risk being late because of the trains. The 43-year-old architect, who regularly travels to London for work, said he had missed meetings because of delays on the tracks. To increase fares during the current mess was an insult, he said.
“I regularly travel to London and it’s already bloody expensive – it can be several hundred pounds if you don’t buy in advance,” he said. “When you’re paying at least £80 a time, a couple of pounds’ increase doesn’t seem to make too much difference – but it definitely adds up.”
