Travels
I have spent much of my Christmas holidays in the UK travelling back and forth between East Malling and London. The first occasion was to obtain my new US visa, and I was shocked to discover the price of a return ticket was an astounding 24 pounds and ninety pence.
Since then, I have been pleased to find that my four trips in the space of one week were not going to set me back 100 pounds, since a cheap day return, valid only after 10am, was only 9.50GBP. However, the most ridiculous thing, which I had forgotten, most British readers will be aware of, but the Americans among you will find crazy, is that a single ticket for the same journey costs 9.40GBP!
There is some sort of strange market forces going on here - buy a single ticket and get a return for only 10p extra. But who on earth would ever think - "Oh yes, I was going to get a taxi back, but I'd better go by train because it's such a bargain...". Are they trying to penalise people making single trips on the train? But why?
posted by Claire @ 12:23 pm
6 comments
6 Comments:
Yes, I've never figured this one out. Er, by the way: killer fog? What?
I guess you didn't see the Evening Standard headline then... I think it might have been the day you got back, actually.
We don't get the Standard down in Kent, to my great chagrin. So, what was Killer about the Fog?
Well, that was indeed the question. Ramzy and I were imagining something overly acidic, which dissolved your flesh as it crept around you.
You didn't buy the Standard to find out? And now we'll never know.
Although my money's on something really prosaic, probably a record number of Yuletide road accidents caused by The Fog.
I've just, improbably, discovered a pertinent fact. If you travel at `peak' times, before 10am or whenever it is, then (at least on the Sevenoaks-Charing Cross line) a return costs twice as much as a single. So the peculiar pricing arrangement only seems to apply to off-peak journeys. Curiouser and curiouser....
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