The European comparison ... again. (2025)

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I get a bit tired of "Rail fares are expensive in the UK^▸ (United Kingdom)" articles such as one that's appeared today [now yesterday] in The Mirror - here's their graph showing 50p per mile which turns out to be a peak single from London to Birmingham with Virgin Trains.

The article admits that UK single fares can be 95% of the return fare, and that the price comes down to just over 25p per mile for return tickets. (Note for the uninitialted - this 95% does NOT apply to many GWR^▸ (Great Western Railway) fares, where the return fare may be as high as twice the single fare). Anyway - I've added that 25p line onto the Mirror's histogram and it makes it loom a bit different.

Routes aren't charged at uniform prices either - a peak day return from Trowbridge to Swindon on the TransWilts will only set you back between 15p and 20p per mile (depending whether you measure mileage as the crow flies or as the train travels) and you'll find offpeak lower in cost, and group travel even cheaper.

I don't have data showing me how the figures in other countries stack up for single v return, not peak v off peak, nor for group travel ... but

"In Britain, those travelling via train are subject to an eye-watering 50p per mile." says the Daily Mirror. "In Wiltshire, groups taking a day trip from Trowbridge to Swindon can pay a fare of just 7.5p per person per mile travelled" say I.

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50p per mile thats cheap!

Swindon to Paddington peak return is 84p per mile!

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Any survey coming out with a single pence-per-mile figure is inevitably misleading.

Interesting though that Italy comes out cheapest in their table, as I read a couple of years ago about the Italian railways being heavily subsidised for cultural as much as economic reasons. The idea is that Italian society places a strong value on home and family, thus maintaining the life of small towns and villages – people don't migrate to cities, because they quite literally want to stay near mama's cooking and their childhood friends. But as in most countries, the job opportunities are concentrated in the big cities, so the railways are heavily subsidised in order to enable long distancing commuting (often hundreds of miles on a Monday morning, staying the week in Milan or wherever, then back again on Friday evening) and preserve communities. Which all sounds like a cliche but all I can say to that is that it was written by an Italian in a serious literary journal! Another effect of this is that jobs on the railways (and other large organisations) are prized because they offer stability; the piece I read talked about the author's friend, an artist of some sort (forgotten exactly), quite successful, who eventually was persuaded to abandon his dream for a position as a booking-clerk.

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While poking about among the data on the RDG^‡(resolve) site, I came across this presentation from Network rail:
Network Rail leading Europe - Challenging assumptions about our relative performance

A lot of the data comes from "RMMS 2014"; "Rail Market Monitoring" is a collection of data put out by the European Commission. They don't label them by year but number them sequentially, I think because the data they contain are variously a year or two years old when published. The latest version of RMMS is the fifth, dated December 2016, so I guess RMMS 2014 is the fourth (dated 2014).

I'm sure Network Rail, the EC, and the (mostly other European) organisations that sourced the data are more honest in handling their data than the Daily Mail. However, at the least a certain amount of cherry-picking is to be expected. And statistics always need to be looked at sceptically, together with their explanations, caveats, and footnotes.

The top-level document of that latest release, "Fifth report on monitoring development of the rail market", is more about the overall European situation than comparisons. The (much) longer "Commission Staff Working Document" has a lot more detail, obviously, and the figures are also available in Excel form.

So you can find out how many of your prejudices (or the Mail's) are borne out!

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I would very much like to see a rail fares comparison which includes a combination of 'pence/cents-per-mile' ticket prices plus the unit cost of whatever state subsidy is applied to the rail industry in each country.

A cursory glance at some of the information on t'interweb seems to indicate that marginal Income Tax rates are generally higher in continental Europe than the UK^▸ (United Kingdom) and I would venture to suggest that some of this cash is probably used to create the illusion of lower ticket prices (just like we used to do!).

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Denmark for example only has singles - buy two singles if you want a return.

It would simplify fares here if adopted at a stroke!

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I would venture to suggest that some of this cash is probably used to create the illusion of lower ticket prices (just like we used to do!).

BR^▸ (British Rail(ways)) was the most efficient railway in Europe. I think in its last day the subsidy per head of UK^▸ (United Kingdom) population was £7 per year. So it was hardly being lavishly subsidised. The privatised network was more heavily subsidised in the early years but they have managed to get that under some kind of control in the last few years with virtually no overall operating subsidy (although much higher sums of tax payer money being spent on upgrades than BR ever did).

My view on fare is that from a social, environmental and moral standpoint you can't justify the eye wateringly expensive ones but that you probably can't justify the dirt cheap ones either and we have a regulatory system which distorts the fares at both extremes with anytime returns artificially sky-rocketing partly because other cheaper fares are capped and advance fares being artificially cheap partly because the TOCs^▸ (Train Operating Company) prefer them because they are allowed to keep all the fare themselves rather than share it with other operators.

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And of course any simplification is likely to remove the "dirt cheap" ones & thus the media & campaigners will immediately jump on the bandwagon to say (cheapest) fares have risen yet again!

Caught between two equally difficult places....

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BR^▸ (British Rail(ways)) was the most efficient railway in Europe.

It certainly had the least subsidy. but did that make it the most efficient?

To my mind the evidence that it was essentially asset stripping the railway taking out capacity wherever it needed to save on renewals and postponing maintenance of drainage, earthworks and structures so that their condition deteriorated.

That is partly why, as demand increased post privatisation, the cost of some of these improvement schemes is so very high as includes many decades of back maintenance. NR^» (Network Rail - home page) have also had to spend a lot of money on earthworks maintenance on GWR^▸ (Great Western Railway) and Bristol Gloucester lines.

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