Ticket prices, as they always do, went up on the first day back at work, and there have been headlines every day since about how it’s now cheaper to travel by air than by rail.

Well, tell us something we don’t know. They’ve been rolling out that headline every January since Stevenson invented the Rocket.

Only The Guardian has done something different, interesting and proactive, in producing a guide to beating the system. A lot of the tips involve buying multiple tickets for your journey, each of which expires at one stop or other along the way, at which point the next one kicks in. However, the writer admits that this isn’t always possible in a paragraph that highlights the absurd mess in which our rail network finds itself:

You can travel between London and Glasgow for less than you can between London and Carlisle, despite the former being much further away. Similarly, you can get a cheaper fare from London to Edinburgh than you can to Newcastle. So if you buy a ticket from the capital to Edinburgh and travel only to Newcastle, you are fine as long as you are on the train. But once your journey is over, you could be stopped by an inspector at Newcastle and forced to pay the difference.

And I trust this to get me to work every day?

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