Trains and jazz...

Train travel in this country is shit. Well, the actual travelling bit isn't that bad to be fair, you get on the train, it moves, so do you, hopefully anyway, and then you get off where you want to, which is what happens in the majority of cases. It's arriving at this situation I have a problem with. First of all, you try and book a ticket. What you could do, is use one of the services that has a database of all journeys you can possibly make in the whole country. Almost immediately things go wrong. There are about 78 different types of ticket for each one of these journeys, almost all mind bogglingly expensive. The one that was cheap sold out before the coming to the messiah because they only allocate half a seat to it just so they can say from cheap on all the posters. The ones that are affordable involve an 18 hour journey via the sea and the rest are way out of the price range for most of us normal lot. It is more expensive for me to travel by standard class than first half of the time because the system seems to be have been designed with the same ammount of logic held by a nut.

Ok, so I've comprimised, I've made the decision to pay a stupid amount of money to go somewhere, for some reason. I want to buy my ticket. Oh I can't. I have to buy the ticket from train company. Oh, ok, so now I have to try, just try, it may take several attempts and possibly a few weeks of man hours to find it again. Finally the last hurdle is in sight, but then, you have to register just to buy a train ticket. Why do we have to register our details and put ourselves at he prey of the useless data protection act just to buy a train ticket? It's madness, and if you're lucky when you've registered and the confirmation email has got past you're spam filter, which only exists because we have to register for everything so we get loads of crap in our inboxes you'll get linked to what you want to buy so you don't have to find it, AGAIN! To accentuate the problem chances are if you don't want to go to London you'll have to change to a different train operator, or many different ones, so you'll have to do this again, or perhaps 2, 3 or maybe even 4 times! I think this is the main problem, our rail services are split up and run by so may different companies, and none of them, in my experience, not one, are any good. None of them seem to offer a service that is particularly good, let alone good enough to pay the over inflated price charged for it.

Howeverm perhaps times will change for the better. This christmas we saw the fall of GNER, who have pulled out from the east coast mainline, good, quite frankly, I'd be suprised if it can get much worse. If pieces of it are bought by other companies this is a good thing, as it reduces the ludicrous ammount of operators in this country. And then who knows, maybe one of them will do something sensible. Sell train travel at a reasonable cost so half the seats arn't empty. Sell tickets where people arn't actually restricted to travelling at shit times and not moving between place to place. Introduce some felixibilty. Some userbility. Something that actually lets human beings act like human beings. Conectivity. Logic. Simplicity. Centralised travel that lets people do just that, not just run up against wall after wall against it. After all, they will only make money by having people use the rails, so why does the whole system seem to be geared to be keeping people in cars and planes? Merry Christmas GNER, let you're shambolic rule over the east coast mainline end as swiftly and pleasently as possible, good riddance and hopefully greetings to a new era of sensible train travel.

Or then again, maybe not, maybe we need to do it ourselves.... But that is a different story for a whole different day.

Train travel is great, but lets let people actually get to do that again.