Thursday 7 June 2012

OK, How About Every Ticket Costs £500, Suggest Train Companies

Britain’s railway thieves today responded to demands for clarity on ticket pricing from the Office Of Rail Regulation, the industry watchdog, by offering to scrap their byzantine labyrinth of unfathomable fares and replace them all with a crystal-clear price of £500 per journey.

"Tickets, please"
“It’s hardly our fault if the travelling public is too dim to steal our top-secret map of Britain’s rail network, identify each station along their route, enter them all into a spreadsheet, spend a day interrogating thetrainline.com, enter all the prices of all possible tickets along every alternative route, write a function to calculate every conceivable fare combination and thereby save - for example - over £20 on a day trip to Bristol from Plymouth simply by purchasing three consecutive tickets between Plymouth, Exeter, Taunton and Bristol for the same train,” complained an ATOC spokesman.

“Only a complete and utter passenger would fork out £51.50 for the Off-Peak Return simply because we say that’s the cheapest ticket,” he pointed out smugly. “You’ll notice that we don’t for a second suggest that it’s the cheapest journey, of course, because we don’t actually let you ask.”

He added that even undiscovered tribes in the Amazon rainforest knew instinctively that it costs six times as much to get from London to Birmingham New Street by 0915 and back in the evening if they travel from Euston station instead of nearby Marylebone.

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