How I got 100% off my train travel

https://readbunce.com/p/how-i-got-100-off-my-train-travel

by pavel_lishin • 1 year ago

248 237 1 year ago

There is a slightly less ethical way to do this, you buy a ticket that mows you to travel at any time of day. Then when you have made your trip log on to realtimetrains to find a train on your route that was delayed and then claim that as your journey.

Now your ticket is sometimes scanned when you enter or leave a station but this is rare and even less likely to be scanned on the train by a conductor.

Anyway that is something that someone could do

ColinWright• 1 year ago

I know people who have done this, but in my mind this is not simply slightly less ethical, is is active fraud.

celticninja2• 1 year ago

Your mind is correct.

rtkwe• 1 year ago

Reminds me of the "Chase Infinite Money Glitch" micro fad from last year. Turns out fraud really is pathway to many forms of free goods the law would consider illegal.

Wonder how many people wound up getting hit with check fraud charges off of that...

edh649• 1 year ago

You could do, but might be caught as 2 were in 2016

https://www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/commuters-ordered-to-repa...

bonobocop4• 1 year ago

The DR system doesn’t look at ticket scans alone. It also builds a profile per customer based on a number data points.

It will flag up quite quickly if you are “sniping” delayed trains at different times.

switch0073• 1 year ago

IANAL but that is 100% straight up fraud. It's the most common accusation I believe regarding delay repay (and the train companies allege it is indeed fraud)

Do not mess with the railways and their revenue in England.

dlcarrier• 1 year ago

Where I live, in the US, the income from light rail fair payers is a laughably small portion of the operating budget, so all rides are effectively discounted by 90%+. The fares really only exist to keep homeless people from sheltering on the trains, but they do that anyway, without a ticket.

Somehow the prices are still high enough that it's cheaper to buy a cheap used car and drive it instead.

WaxProlix• 1 year ago

Somehow the prices are still high enough that it's cheaper to buy a cheap used car and drive it instead.

Cars are even more heavily subsidized, maybe?

dbspin• 1 year ago

Find this curious. Surely factoring in the cost of tax and insurance greatly increases the cost of the used car? I'm based in Europe so perhaps things are radically different in the US.

add-sub-mul-div• 1 year ago

The difference is that in America we have politicians who cultivate a fear of cities, public transportation, and not owning a bigger car than you need.

hansvm• 1 year ago

Trains and buses in the US, where they exist, have ticket prices on par with the amount of gas a single person would use driving a used car. For very long trips they're a bit cheaper (up to 2x). For very short trips they're often a lot more expensive (up to 5x). For trips more than an hour or two, the one-way cost usually has no significant discount on a round-trip ticket, and you can pay 10x more if you don't buy well in advance and go on the cheapest days.

The effects of that vary. Relating to TFA, if you were making this trip 6x per year, could plan the dates, were always travelling alone, and didn't need any transportation anywhere the rest of the year beyond what walking and biking could provide, you'd expect the train to be about break-even with gas+maintenance. It wouldn't be worth having the car.

As soon as any of those assumptions change though, that logic goes out the window.

Suppose you have to get to work (and that rent/housing is enough higher near work that it's worth commuting _somehow_ by a substantial margin). The markup for short trips is very high for public transit, Uber, and all your other normal alternatives. You'll be money ahead on a decent used car (clean, no body damage, new enough to easily last 100k miles even if you know nothing about cars) in a year, even counting the entire purchase price, taxes, insurance, and everything else.

Under the assumption you have a car already and only have to consider unit costs (depreciation, gas, maintenance), trips like TFA can start to make a lot of sense to drive, depending on your personal preferences. Every long bus trip I've taken in the US has been so rattly and bumpy that I couldn't sleep or type anyway, and by the end of a trip they've been so full that I couldn't type anyway (tall, broad shoulders, the geometry doesn't work out in narrow seats with so little space to the seat in front of me that I already have to angle my legs just to fit). I'd much rather listen to my own music or a cooking show or something, keep the temperature exactly where I'd like it, have the flexibility to carry a few extra items, and get to my destination in half the time without stopping 20 places to pick up more passengers. When the money's a wash, I'll pick the car every time.

If you're willing to make tweaks to your life to save money/fuel/..., it's also worth looking at the possibility of carpooling. If you can go with one other coworker, you're already a lot of money ahead on the train. If you additionally didn't know your return date in advance (variable length job, which you're staying at for a small but undetermined number of days), the difference in ticket prices would be enough to completely pay for insurance and taxes for the year, on top of depreciation, gas, and maintenance. Those 6 trips would justify owning a used car for any other part of your life where the unit economics made sense.

If you work remotely, live in a nice climate close to groceries, or have any number of other nice properties to your life, a car doesn't necessarily make sense. Our infrastructure doesn't often make the alternatives pleasant though. E.g., I was pretty adamant about biking through college. The city wouldn't plow the bike paths till days after any major snowstorm though, the snow was always falling into the edges of the road, and there was a zero percent chance I was going to bike out in the middle of an icy 45mph road in front of pickup trucks who think it's sane to tailgate in those conditions. 6+ months each year, the only non-car option was walking. I did that a couple winters, but 5 miles each way is a bear when you're trudging through snow, and the one semester I had an evening class I always thought long and hard about whether I'd stay at school an extra 8 hours or add an extra 10 miles to my day.

Details vary, but _most_ Americans are in some sort of similar situation where cars are the only realistic option if you can possibly afford it. Trudging through the snow when it's <-10F the entire month of January is fine if you're young and single, but I wouldn't want to carry a kid to their doctor in that environment. Tons of people just live too far from town for non-car options to be practical. Roads poorly designed for rain and pedestrians limit the safety and practicality of biking in other huge swathes of the country. And so on.

Mind you, I'm not against public transport or anything. The BART trains here in the Bay are something I use a few times a year, and they're perfectly fine. You can even get work done on them if you'd like. My point is that cases where trains and buses are the best option (or even any option) are so rare that for most Americans you can assume that the cost of insurance and taxes for a car have already been taken care of, so that only the unit economics of a given trip play into whether you'd drive or not (when considering it financially).

bombcar4• 1 year ago

Insurance on a beater can be quite low if you’re not a young male or bad driver. Like $1-200/yr.

bryanlarsen2• 1 year ago

Somehow the prices are still high enough that it's cheaper to buy a cheap used car and drive it instead.

City streets and roads are paid for through property taxes, so they are subsidized 100%.

Tade02• 1 year ago

You could say the same about rail infrastructure, but you cannot use private vehicles there (legally).

colechristensen2• 1 year ago

Gas taxes and toll revenue account for about 1/3 of road infrastructure spend these days. This is significantly less than years past as the fixed gas tax hasn't kept up with inflation or adjusted upwards enough to match efficiency gains.

timewizard• 1 year ago

Roads allow goods and services to be imported and exported from an area. The subsidy brings public benefit.

comte7092• 1 year ago

Somehow the prices are still high enough that it's cheaper to buy a cheap used car and drive it instead.

I find this claim to be incredibly dubious.

More convenient? A practical necessity? Sure.

Cheaper? Gonna need to see some receipts.

Edit: since at least one person appears to be grumpy about my comment, here is an example of a large system with light rail:

https://www.dart.org/fare/general-fares-and-overview/fares

For less than $200/month you can ride however much you want, with reduced price options for local fares and other groups of riders like low income, etc.

If you have a problem with my comment, please explain how you can but and operate a used car for less than that price when you factor in gas, tires, maintenance, insurance, etc. it’s just BS.

eigenspace2• 1 year ago

Car owners live in denial about the costs of their vehicles. They often believe their only cost is gas and maybe insurance.

PaulDavisThe1st5• 1 year ago

I love trains. But ... the New Mexico Rail Runner (Santa Fe <-> Albuquerque, though technically the southern terminus is Belen) is estimated to have a subsidy of US$28,000 per rider per year.

brewdad• 1 year ago

A monthly transit pass costs me $100 where I am in the US. Also, as long as you use the same payment method every time, the system tracks when you've reached the daily max and monthly max and stops charging you for the remainder of the period so you don't even need to buy the pass ahead of time. It couldn't be easier and there isn't a reliable used car you could drive for cheaper.

I still own and use a car because there is enough friction in day to day errands that transit isn't a great option for. For trips to downtown or the various arenas, it works wonderfully though.

TulliusCicero• 1 year ago

Somehow the prices are still high enough that it's cheaper to buy a cheap used car and drive it instead.

Cars benefit from enormous subsidies that are typically even greater than for public transit.

This obviously true for the monetary value of building all the roads and highways a city has, but it's even more true in terms of land usage. Cars in US cities tend to be allotted far, far more land than space reserved for walking, biking, or public transit. Since land use is mostly zero-sum, this is an extraordinary amount of investment that cars receive as a mode.

And of course, it's not just the roads. Mandatory parking minimums in zoning codes in most cities require businesses to allocate huge amounts of space for free car parking. This is a large de facto subsidy that also inhibits every other mode.

stego-tech2• 1 year ago

This seems the perfect setup for malicious compliance of arbitrary RTO policies.

* You may very well be more productive on a quiet train than a noisy office

* Inconsistent WiFi coverage could let you focus on work instead of video conferencing meetings

* Arriving late means you don’t have to stay long - not your fault the train was delayed, after all!

Your employer gets the badge data showing you technically showed up, you have the receipts on why you were late, and you get a partial or full refund on the delayed train fare for good measure.

thi2• 1 year ago

Does it work that way where you are from? Here in Germany it is entirely the workers responsibility to arrive on time, being repeatedly late can lead to being fired. Usually everyone knows how bad the trains are and it's not enforced strictly but thats just the employers good will.

stego-tech2• 1 year ago

I'm from the States, but it generally varies from employer to employer and role to role. If you're sitting on a support queue in a specific time zone then yes, there's often an expectation of consistent hours; for more general office work (especially since COVID), there's often an understood degree of flexibility in most cases.

As for transit delays, yes, those are also often excused within reason so long as there's not a recurring pattern. Still, hybrid work policies give workers wiggle room to reasonably challenge these requirements, especially if they're already completing all assigned work from home without issue, and that's the main point I was trying to make with my comment.

Labor is ultimately a negotiation, and this is one such tactic to take if it's available to you.

sarreph• 1 year ago

The UK train system is a dire, expensive mess. Attempting to avoid getting directly political here, but I strongly believe it’s one of the lowest hanging fruit a political party could act on to curry favour with the electorate.

Would be amazing to see this productised à la the way split ticketing works.

controlledchaos• 1 year ago

As a North American who travels in the UK multiple times per year, I really need you to elaborate. My experience has been nothing less than amazing, in comparison to the complete lack of rail options at home.

djhworld• 1 year ago

If you travel in and around the South East, inc. London the service is pretty good, regular although still very very expensive.

In the north though it’s a mixed bag, frequently delayed, huge underinvestment, expensive etc.

moomin• 1 year ago

America has much more serious problems with rail, but the UK experience still isn't great. The broad root cause is that back in the day we had the genius idea of paying multiple private companies to run trains on shared lines. We set up metrics to measure their performance that, bluntly, do not work. They underinvest and when there's any sign they're not making money, they hand the contract back. All in all, we get all the disadvantages of a nationalised system with all the disadvantages of a privatised system with a couple of original problems thrown in for good measure.

But the train near my house still runs.

graemep2• 1 year ago

Low bar? British people tend to compare with rail travel experienced on holidays in places like France. Those systems do seem to be better (I do not have recent experience myself) and this then feeds the usual British tendency to take a rosy tinted view of the rest of the world and pessimism about the UK.

It also varies a lot in different places. Costs vary with types of tickets, who you are, and whether you have various discounts.

Local train services are very weak where I live (Cheshire) so while I can get to major cities quite easily its difficult to travel between towns in the county on trains (or buses).

spxcxlxxs• 1 year ago

I'm surprised nobody has mentioned Japan. Wait till you try the trains there!

They're so punctual that delays issue a certificate for employees to present to employers*

* Source: random article

prmoustache• 1 year ago

I have lived in Switzerland for year and my very limited experience with trains in Scotland has been great. Trains were on time, and personel at the railway stations were very polite and helpful with us.

But maybe we were just lucky.

oniony2• 1 year ago

I often travel intercity to London and a ticket travelling out early, say, Monday and returning after peak hours, say, Wednesday costs upwards of £75. I have to book well in advance to get this price. I have just priced such a journey and the cheapest I can get for the days I chose next week is £105, for example. The journey time is about 2:20 but often it takes 10 minutes longer.

Quite often (maybe 1 in 6) my train to London would get cancelled. I would be able to get a refund no problem, but there is no compensation for the fact I have driven to the station and am now stuck without any travel plans.

Conversely I would have to arrive at the station early, for if I missed my train I would forfeit that half of the ticket and would have to pay again to travel on the later train. As such my journey would actually also include an extra 15 minutes of slack time in case the car didn't start and I needed to wake the wife for a lift, for example. It would also be quite stressful on the way home, where a meeting might overrun, putting my chances of getting my booked train at risk.

A year or two ago they opened a new "parkway" railway station (basically park-and-ride) and now the earliest train no longer stops at my local station. It would take me 30 minutes to drive to the parkway station, plus cost me £6 a day parking there, so my only option now is the later train which arrives in London at 8:30, if it is on time, making it impossible for me to start work before 9am.

The trains are supposed to have eight carriages, of which one is first class. On the outward journey I could often get a seat but the return journey would be standing only for the first hour. Quite often the train would arrive with only five carriages meaning it would be absolutely rammed the whole way. This leaves you very exhausted and sweaty for the start of the work day. And forget first class: it is twice the price of standard class.

So I've given up with the long distance train and now drive down to a commuter town near London and get the train just the final bit. I can also get into London much earlier and I don't have to pre-book specific trains. It's actually cheaper too, with the fuel and train tickets coming in at about £65, though obviously there's car depreciation, tyres, &c. on top.

So between £75-£130 for a prebooked ticket on an inflexible, specifically timed, intercity train, with a total journey time of about 3:00, or £65 for a drive down in my own car whatever times I want with a total journey time of about 3:30.

habosa• 1 year ago

I’m an American who lived in London for 3 years and was also impressed, but as someone who only had to use national rail for leisure (got around London by bus/tube) I was oblivious to two things:

1) Commute hours are brutal. Trains are packed and even a few minutes delay can feel like ages when you’re missing a meeting.

2) The cost of 5x weekly round trips is enormous. The average annual pass for someone commuting into London from outside is like £4000. That’s in a country where the average wage is around £40,000. That’s a huge amount of money to spend on public transportation. I know a car would be more but I’ve never met a single American who spends that fraction of their income on public transportation.

Still though … I’d rather have expensive and unreliable trains than no trains at all.

sksksk4• 1 year ago

I agree that it's a dire , expensive mess. But it doesn't seem like low hanging fruit at all...

Anything that will improve the situation will be expensive and/or take a long time to achieve.

HPsquared• 1 year ago

And "short-term cost, long-term benefit" is kryptonite to the average politician. "We get the blame, the next guy takes the credit"

crowselect2• 1 year ago

I mean there’s pretty low hanging fruit mentioned in the article. If rail strikes are frequent enough to feature in the formula, end the strikes by paying the workers well.

0xbadcafebee• 1 year ago

Anything that will improve the situation will be expensive and/or take a long time to achieve

Only if you do it properly.

isaacremuant2• 1 year ago

That's why we focus on the important stuff like spending several million to call lines suffragette and lionness.

cameronh90• 1 year ago

There is some low hanging fruit, like the ticketing system.

Might be possible to improve satisfaction without costly infrastructure upgrades by ensuring you have a seat for long trips and being more aggressive with discounts at quiet times.

Plenty of times I’ve been one of like 30 people on a 12 car train despite the ticket having cost £60. The train is going to run anyway, so may as well price more aggressively.

amiga3862• 1 year ago

It's harder than it looks. Excluding special cases like HS1 and TfL, we have three players:

- Network Rail, who maintain the entire country's track, signalling, etc. Also owns and runs some major stations. Run at arms length by government, centrally funded.

- Train Operating Companies (TOCs), who won a bid held every few years on how much they'll pay the government to be allowed a monopoly on running a particular regional service franchise. Government sets the rules of the franchise, e.g. customer compensation, punctuality targets, etc. TOCs have no control over the network. They lease trains from ROSCOs. They pay and schedule drivers, guards/ticket inspectors, ticket desks, customer support, station staff (they're also responsible for running most stations), and get money in by selling tickets to the public.

- Rolling Stock Companies (ROSCOs), who own (commission and maintain) the trains and lease them out to TOCs for exhorbitant prices. ROSCOs extract most of the value of the railway. ROSCOs exist because trains are so expensive that neither government nor TOCs can afford them.

Many of these TOCs are other countries national rail operators in disguise, e.g. the Scotrail franchise was recently run by Abellio which was actually the Dutch national railway company (NS). So all profits (not that there are many) leave the country and subsidise other countries' rail networks.

The current government has committed to taking back ownership of all TOCs at the end of their franchise terms, so in future both Network Rail and all TOCs will be publicly owned.

But at the same time, that might not make anything cheaper; most of the value is sucked out by ROSCOs, so unless the government commits to buying its own trains too, the ROSCOs will just charge more for the same trains if they see the government finding any efficiencies, ensuring tickets don't get cheaper.

Some fuming about ROSCO dividend payments: https://www.rmt.org.uk/news/rail-rolling-stock-company-turns...

And to add to that, much of the cost (or cost savings) the TOCs were pursuing were effectively industrial relations - can they get away with having driver-only or driverless trains, in order to have just 1 or 0 paid staff member per train? Unions say "no". Union members start working to rule and suddenly you have no trains on Sunday, even if you're the government.

So... it's tricky.

blibble5• 1 year ago

there is no doubt that the early ROSCO deals were outrageously tilted against taxpayers/passengers (they pay £1 for old BR trains the state paid for, then we pay them to rent them back)

however the newer ones are significantly better

funding the capital cost of a billion pounds of new trains isn't free (even for a government), and there is risk on that investment

they also maintain the trains (to varying levels of quality)

stephen_g2• 1 year ago

ROSCOs exist because trains are so expensive that neither government nor TOCs can afford them.

Is this sarcasm that I am missing? There is absolutely no reason that Government (or a Government-owned business) couldn't "afford" rolling stock. That's a really poor excuse (and completely made up) if they claim that.

blibble5• 1 year ago

it's not dire and it's not expensive compared to the next reasonable alternatives

if you compare the cost of a London commuter belt season ticket compared to the cost of driving+parking, it is still very much a bargain

Symbiote3• 1 year ago

It's expensive for irregular users.

If I want to visit friends in Derby, coming from London, that's £81. For no good reason, a return ticket is £84.

If I need to travel at peak times, that's £123.

Booked months in advance it might be £20, roughly what a bus ticket costs.

reitanuki• 1 year ago

Maybe commuting can be a good deal sometimes, but for a 5 hour trip for 2 people with railcards, we were looking at £160ish when booked in advance (!) or £400ish if not.

If we drive our car, this is 4 hours with less than £35 of petrol (the full tank is approx £35 and it gets us there and some of the way back).

Booking in advance and having to get stressed about making it to the station on time, dealing with the frequent delays (I only started driving a year or two ago, so for many years I've been coping with the train, and genuinely it is delayed 50% or more for this journey in my experience) which can easily be another 2 hours on top etc, having to process the delay repay evidence for that, ...

Add to that, these 'cheap' fares are usually for awkward times, like arriving late at night. And then I have to get someone to pick me up from the station on the far end as well.

You can rightfully point out that my car needs maintenance too, but we have to do that anyway and I'd still argue that it's not enough to make up the difference.

Very tangentially, but a few years ago I was travelling at Christmas and the ticket machines were broken so wouldn't dispense the ticket I had already bought (for collection on departure). The station staff and train staff let us through for 2 trains, but on the 3rd train the guard was so vicious and insisted we pay for a whole new ticket for the whole journey, at full price with no railcard discounts or anything, which came to the aforementioned £400 when we had already paid £160. Was she right to do this? Maybe, but merry Christmas lol.

We were pretty miffed to say the least and it definitely spoilt the Christmas time a bit! £400 is not nothing for us to say the least. I eventually got it back by filing a chargeback with my bank. The train company never answered my e-mails or apparently even Mastercard's communications on the matter, so the ruling went to me by default. Kind of amusing in a way, but not an experience I'd like to repeat and it took 4 months.

So is the train not dire? I can't say I'm rushing to get back on it.

secondcoming• 1 year ago

All the train drivers recently got massive pay increases so we can expect efficiency and cost to improve sometime soon!

jdietrich• 1 year ago

Only 2% of all journeys in the UK are made by train. Only 8% of people in England use trains at least once per week.

The professional-managerial class grossly over estimate the social and economic importance of passenger rail, because the network was built to serve their needs.

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/66c5c0b6cbe60...

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5a815d8e40f0b...

crazygringo• 1 year ago

Well yeah, you're not going to take a train to the corner store. Your PDF notes that 29% of trips are made on foot.

2% of trips by train is a lot higher than the number of trips by airplane... And again, 8% of people using trains once a week is a lot higher than they use planes...

...And yet I don't think anybody "grossly overestimates" the social and economic importance of airplanes.

People use trains to visit family, go sightseeing, and so forth. They're a hugely important part of infrastructure, even if most people don't use them daily.

Doctor_Fegg2• 1 year ago

Now try closing the railways of south-east England and see how well the roads hold up without them.

sebtron• 1 year ago

Avanti West Coast offers customers:
15 minutes — 25% off
30 minutes — 50% off
1 hour + — 100% off

To me they look like very generous refund policies. I checked Italy's Trenitalia and what they offer is[1]:

30-119 minutes: 25%
120+ minutes: 50%

I suppose anything below 30 minutes is consideres "on time".

[1] https://www.trenitalia.com/it/informazioni/indennizzo_per_ri...

dylan6042• 1 year ago

I suppose anything below 30 minutes is consideres "on time".

sounds about right for the stereotype. it's the 'murikans that are the ones so uptight about time

ikawe• 1 year ago

I think by and large this doesn’t play out with trains. American trains tend to be much less frequent, slower, and less comfortable than most European trains.

I road a swiss train a couple years ago that was something like 5 minutes late. To me (American) it was “on time” but the conductor came on the PA and apologized. He did make a point to clarify the delay was because they’d been stuck behind an off schedule German train.

kevinventullo• 1 year ago

Japan would like to have a word.

tdeck• 1 year ago

FWIW Amtrak's policy is 15 minutes, but they're not known for being on time:

https://www.amtrak.com/on-time-performance

It's interesting how much effort here is dedicated to explaining that it's the freight rail companies' fault.

sensen• 1 year ago

I commuted via train for years when I lived in Chicago and a refund policy like Italy's definitely would've been amazing. Perhaps the trains would be more reliable with refunds, all we received was a late slip when the train was delayed by 2 hours..

BeeOnRope• 1 year ago

What is a late slip?

Tomte• 1 year ago

Deutsche Bahn: 1hr+ --> 25%, 2hr+ --> 50%

eCa• 1 year ago

I believe that’s the level EU requires for long distance trains.

chgs2• 1 year ago

So 80% of journeys have a 50% refund?

chgs2• 1 year ago

This is standard U.K. policy

tecleandor• 1 year ago

When high speed trains started operating on Spain in 1992 (AVE [0]) they offered 100% refund in any delay higher than 5 minutes (here a TV ad with very happy passengers because the train is arriving six minutes late [1])

But nowadays and after some mismanagement and also private operators coming to share lines it's:

For all high speed and other long distance trains: 60min delay, 50% refund. 90min delay, 100% refund.

This and other policies [2]

  0: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AVE
  1: https://youtu.be/Djv91oHkj4k
  2: https://www.renfe.com/es/es/ayuda/compromiso-puntualidad

brnt• 1 year ago

I was once over 90 minutes late on a TGV. Naturally, SNCF reported a delay of 59 minutes when calculating my rebate...

dataengineer56• 1 year ago

This is UK law(?) or standard across all rail networks. It's automated too, you don't have to fill in a form. Immediately after arriving at your destination you get an email telling you that your train was delayed by enough to give you compensation, click a link and the money is in your bank account in a couple of days.

lozenge2• 1 year ago

Automatic Delay Repay depends on your train company and which company you used to buy the ticket.

ivanjermakov2• 1 year ago

Trenitalia would be out of business with higher refunds haha. I had horrible experience with rail transit in Italy.

diffuse_l• 1 year ago

This reminds me that I once worked in one city, and attended university in another city.

At some point, there were train lines works that lasted for a few years, which meant that almost any train ride was delayed. You got a ticket back for half an hour delay, and two for a full hour.

In addition, my workplace paid me a set amount of money to cover ttain travel expenses for each work day.

I think that for most of my studies I effectively didn't pay for train travel, and had time to work while on the train.

You did have to wait in line to get the ticket after the train ride, and the train officer wasn't too happy about giving out tickets, bit it usually worked...

weinzierl• 1 year ago

In Germany you can use

https://bahnvorhersage.de

It is meant to be used to find reliable connections, but of course you can use it to save money as described in the article.

Here is the 38c3 talk about the project from one the creators:

https://media.ccc.de/v/38c3-wann-klappt-der-anschluss-wann-n...

probably_wrong• 1 year ago

The talk is great and I can definitely recommend it.

The website doesn't seem to work in any of my browsers.

switch0073• 1 year ago

I'd heavily caution people against this. The railway operators are both litigious and invested in fraud detection technology. And they love going on fishing exercises

Consistent 100% delay repay will absolutely get flagged

monkey_monkey• 1 year ago

What's fraudulent about this?

bonobocop4• 1 year ago

I don’t think it’s fraud on the DR side if you actually take the trains and intend to travel.

If you didn’t actually intend to travel, then claiming DR is fraud.

switch0073• 1 year ago

I didn't claim it was fraudulent, as IANAL (but I probably agree that it isn't). I should have put "fraud" in quotes as they are not too strict when claiming that. "fraud"/"abuse"/"irregularity" detection systems

It doesn't have to meet a legal definition of fraud for them to be able to shake you down either. They do plenty of fishing exercises and allegations without much of a strong case, hoping you'll pay up.

The government is very very hands off when it comes to the railway - law unto their own (except for the operators owned by the government - no escaping blame there!).

A lot of railway legislation offences are strict liability offences - ie there is no excuse and no proof of intent required. It is from there comes a lot of their bullying behaviour and a belief of what they say goes.

sksksk4• 1 year ago

I expense all my work travel, and get to keep delay repay payments for myself.

My number one trick to getting the payments: get the tightest connection possible.

For the journey I take frequently, the train arrives into the main station at 8:52pm, my connection is at 9pm; picking up just 8 minutes of delays means I'll miss the connection. The next train is at 10pm, which triggers delay repay.

joshstrange• 1 year ago

Maybe I've underestimating the amount of money we are talking about but I'd much rather be where I'm headed on time than travel for free, especially on a regular basis.

declan_roberts2• 1 year ago

GP's comment sounds like hell for a few bucks. I'll avoid making any other observations.

sksksk4• 1 year ago

Depending on when you travel, it can be very expensive. If I want to travel at peak time (arriving into London before 10am, and out before 7pm), then we're looking at around £400

satyamkapoor• 1 year ago

Omg! Wait till you see the German railways reliability.

cammikebrown• 1 year ago

I missed seeing Mt. Fuji from my Shinkansen window seat because the train was ahead of schedule and my alarm went off after we had passed it.

declan_roberts2• 1 year ago

Nihongo problems.

bobnamob3• 1 year ago

Ironic read given I'm currently sat on a half hour delayed, hopelessly overcrowded (due to 2 prior cancellations) Avanti west coast service.

I'll be happy to claim my delay repay on my employer's dime for the 5th time this year. My only regret is that I booked off-peak

bobnamob3• 1 year ago

Oh it gets so much worse. Train is now parked up just outside Manchester with zero power. Another 10mins is worth £35 at this point

eszed• 1 year ago

Did you get there in the end?

zfnmxt• 1 year ago

if the baseline chance of delay is 10%, engineering works add 25%, strikes add 35%, and bad weather adds 20%, then when all these problems happen, there's a 90% chance your train will be delayed.

What if signal failures "add" 15%? Then all factors combined would mean that there's a 105% chance your train will be delayed!

Adding up probabilities like this doesn't make sense. If you simplify these things as independent events, the probability of delay is just the 1 minus the product of all the probabilities of each event not happening (i.e., 1 - P(event)).

As for the article---I think you really undervalue your time and the price of inconvenience. I can see how you can romanticize it as a nice way to get things done, but (dealing with) train delays is hardly distraction free and is full of forced setting changes and (very) shit working environments (like waiting on a platform). This is a bad deal, even if it's free. Money is there to to be spent; this is a instance in which to spend it, moral/ethical/fraud concerns aside.

But hey maybe you're a Von Neuman type and thrive in cacophony and chaos.

Aeolun4• 1 year ago

Most of these trains are one and done things straight from the departure station to London?

The only experience I have was taking them in the other direction though, because I opted for a flight instead of dealing with it again to go back to London.

Was a new experience booking a train ticket and seeing a quote of £250. I thought the machine was broken.

MathMonkeyMan• 1 year ago

Your comment made me wonder. 65% chance of delay.

    >>> s = 'if the baseline chance of delay is 10%, engineering works add 25%, strikes add 35%, and bad weather adds 20%'
    >>> pb = 0.1
    >>> pe = 0.25
    >>> ps = 0.35
    >>> pw = 0.2
    >>> p = 1 - (1 - pb)*(1 - pe)*(1 - ps)*(1 - pw)
    >>> p
    0.649

irjustin• 1 year ago

Agreed, but also where did those %'s come from? Seems like thin air so it's really all a gamble at this point.

ValentineC2• 1 year ago

As for the article---I think you really undervalue your time and the price of inconvenience. I can see how you can romanticize it as a nice way to get things done, but (dealing with) train delays is hardly distraction free and is full of forced setting changes and (very) shit working environments (like waiting on a platform).

By delays, I think the author meant that they get on a train, then sit in it for ~5 hours, with the option of paying roughly twice the price for first class [1].

As someone who frequently uses their laptop on public transport too, this sounds like a great way to either get things done or pass time.

[1] https://www.avantiwestcoast.co.uk/travel-information/onboard...

Doctor_Fegg2• 1 year ago

Though the problem is that delayed trains are often overcrowded trains. And overcrowded trains are not conducive for doing work on a laptop, unless you like sitting on the vestibule floor outside the toilet door with your laptop on your knees.

sveme• 1 year ago

Sir, this is an Englishman writing; he‘s obviously taking the piss.

WindyMiller2• 1 year ago

I think you really undervalue the pleasure of getting one over on our awful train system, and also overestimate how much money the young people of the UK have access to.

tempfile3• 1 year ago

For small probabilities it works :)

1-(1-p1)(1-p2) = p1+p2-p1p2

and a similar formula holds for more terms. so neglecting terms of order p^2 gives the form in the article

sebastiennight• 1 year ago

For probabilities (much) smaller than 10%, sure.

But adding 10%, 20%, and 35%, is already a pretty bad start. The error rate becomes huge. (in the article example, the 10% estimate of chances of being on time is ~3.5 smaller than the actual 35% correct result).

Being wrong by half an order of magnitude, is being quite wrong :)

m463• 1 year ago

"Sure, there were some pretty brutal ‘all-dayers’."

lol - fast or cheap, pick one.

sidewndr46• 1 year ago

I used a much simpler variant of this to get Amazon Prime for free for years. When I needed something off Amazon, I'd just wait until the day before it was going to rain then order it with next day delivery. The couriers at that point in time seemed comically unable to deliver anything if it rained. Once it arrived late, open a case and ask for a month of free Amazon prime. This worked up until they discontinued that as a potential compensation.

aredox• 1 year ago

You know the couriers got punished for it? Whereas you enjoyed free stuff

ivanjermakov2• 1 year ago

OC should not be blamed for such ugly company policies, blame Amazon.

more_corn• 1 year ago

You guys get trains?

nextts• 1 year ago

Until you get stuck somewhere and you need a hotel or taxi. Unless they reimburse that?

apexalpha3• 1 year ago

I did something similar in the Netherlands.

Due to an array of issues the train company has abysmall on-time records on our only high speed line, connecting A'dam to Brussels, Paris and London.

I mean we are still talking about 82% on time, not 60% lmao. But compared to the 97,6% of normal trains it's bad.

But anyway you can ask for your money back just like in the UK. The trick is that when you travel on a business card your company pays, but you get the reimbursement when delayed.

Must've made hundreds over the years. Everytime I heard the brakes I heard the cash register sound and since it's a train I would just happily chug along with my work anyway.

huskyr• 1 year ago

Seeing the rates here for other countries at least it's a better deal: 50% for delays of 30-60m, and 100% for delays of an hour or longer.

shmeeed2• 1 year ago

The trick is that when you travel on a business card your company pays, but you get the reimbursement when delayed.

TBH that sounds just like fraud to me, and on discovery could (probably, IANAL) justify immediate lawful termination. It's a nice loophole though, if you don't give a f*.

apexalpha3• 1 year ago

My company has an enterprise arrangement with the train company. All employees have a business card.

This is the correct and legitimate use of said system.

killingtime74• 1 year ago

I guess this only works for people whose time is worth nothing

vander_elst• 1 year ago

Any insights why trains are pathologically late? It's easy to blame incompetence, but I think it's too naive, I wonder what are the causes connection are late day after day, year after year. Why is it so difficult to create a reliable model for something we have been working for dozens of decades and we have a good control of?

Philpax• 1 year ago

Organisational culture / funding / quality of infrastructure. Compare Swiss trains to German trains: geographically colocated, but the former is known for extreme timeliness, while the latter is known for extreme tardiness.

If you want good service, you need to invest and keep investing - it's not a one and done thing, especially as the city and population change around your network.

isaacremuant2• 1 year ago

Until there's better transparency of the train system in London, I'd say that most of the excuses they give are iterative bullshit and cost saving measures.

We need the peasants to go to work but we don't need to offer these low traffic route on Sundays so we won't and we'll call it "Planned engineering works" every time, every year.

If someone has detailed transparency on what they are instead of blind authoritarianism like in the train forums/Reddit please be my guest.

I wonder if they have re-enacted their refunds page which was down for months "due to cyber security incident".

Such a scammy, partially tax funded service that costs an insane amount.

yapyap• 1 year ago

Wow, the train system actually giving you something when it’s late seems great, NS should take notes.

brainzap• 1 year ago

ccc has a talk about predicting on deutsche bahn which trains will be delayed

but: being stuck in a train for 3 hours is not worth 50 euros

ralferoo• 1 year ago

This reminds me of many years ago when I was backpacking around Australia. For whatever reason, I was wandering around a smallish town around 10am on a Sunday morning and ordered food from either McDonalds or Hungry Jacks (aka Burger King).

I was the only customer, and after a few minutes, she called me over and gave me my money back. I asked why, assuming that they'd just discovered they'd run out of ingredients, but no, she said it was because it had taken too long to prepare, so it was free. This is something I'd never experienced in the UK before, and in fact McDonalds in the UK can sometimes take 10 minutes - compared to back home, it hadn't struck me as being particularly slow.

It occurred to me that I was probably their first customer of the day and that anyone else who rocked up on a Sunday morning on other weeks as their first customer would probably also get their food for free as e.g. fries would be cooked on demand instead of being ready.

How I got 100% off my train travel

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