Andrew Vine: Freeze our train fares until service is up to standard

That’s because they’ll be paying more for the privilege of standing packed in – shoulder-to-shoulder – with complete strangers on clapped out trains with too few seats.

They may or may not arrive at work on time depending on delays, and the commute back home is not likely to be any more comfortable. It is not a prospect to put a spring in the step of the thousands getting back into the daily routine.

Many might reflect whilst counting the minutes until the uncomfortable journeys are over that they are employed by firms that would not dream of raising prices for their goods and services because of the risk of alienating customers at a time of economic uncertainty.

Especially not currently, when the inflation rate remains relatively low and business decisions are taken cautiously and only after much deliberation because of the still-unknown consequences of Brexit.

But the rail companies appear not have any such concerns. To them, customers are cash cows, to be milked relentlessly, even as they are being transported little better than cattle.

Fares rose yesterday by an average of 2.3 per cent – very nearly double the current rate of inflation of 1.2 per cent.

Other fares will go up even higher. Passengers on the East Coast main line face a 5.5 per cent hike, and some tickets on the route will go up by seven per cent.

And what will be delivered in return to the long-suffering passengers? More seats? Faster, more reliable trains?

None of the above.

For shelling out more on tickets, passengers will receive precisely nothing to make their commutes easier or more comfortable.

As consumers, there are few more galling things for any of us than feeling we are being exploited because a provider of a service knows we have little choice but to use it.

That is the position the crowds flocking into Yorkshire’s stations find themselves in. Those who use the trains do so because, for all their shortcomings, they are the most straightforward way of getting to and from work.

The competition between rival service providers that helps to keep prices down in other areas of the economy is absent on the railways. Once a franchise is awarded, the poor old commuter is stuck with it irrespective of whether it works well or not.

So the public is expected to pay through the nose to travel on sometimes decrepit trains in conditions that their counterparts in Europe would regard as outrageous.

It is passengers who have made the railways the success story they are, yet little in the way of tangible improvements – let alone thanks – come their way.

Virgin Trains announced last week that passenger numbers on the East Coast main line had reached a million for the first time, showing an eight per cent year-on-year increase.

That’s going to make the bottom line look a lot healthier when all those extra passengers have no option but to pay a 5.5 per cent increase in fares.

And a study of Britain’s trains revealed that the rolling stock is on average more than 20 years old. Yorkshire’s commuters know that only too well, with many still squeezing on to the uncomfortable and woefully outdated Pacer trains that should have been sent on a final journey to the scrapyard years ago.

There is a disconnect between the train companies and the people who travel. Passengers have no affection for the railways, and little regard for the operators. They grin and bear the conditions and price rises because they have to, not because the service is what they want.

Lip service might be paid to customer care, but there is precious little evidence of it actually happening. The protracted industrial dispute on the Southern network is proof of that.

Vast numbers of people simply trying to get to work and earn their living have been left stranded whilst the company and the Government have failed miserably to get to grips with the issues and sort them out.

Yet still the prices go up with wearisome regularity, added to which is the tangled mess that is ticket pricing, resulting in passengers paying even more than they need to because the cheapest option is not always easy to find.

It’s time for fares to be frozen and the annual price hike to be abandoned until the travelling public get the trains and the treatment they deserve.

That means modern rolling stock with enough seats to routinely accommodate all the people who want to travel comfortably and in civilised conditions, not jammed in.

We do not have the railway we expect, and until we get it, it is not only unfair, but an insult, to expect passengers to pay ever more to travel.