Why the way I booked a May Day train works for me – but not the rail industry

Independent

30-04-2025

On 1 May, I will board a morning train from London King's Cross to County Durham. I bought the ticket from LNER, the state-run train operator on the East Coast Main Line. The train, though, is actually Grand Central – the 'open access' division of Arriva, ultimately owned by German Railways.
However complex the hierarchy, the traveller is the winner.
Open access operators are blossoming across Europe. They are commercial enterprises that run long-distance services, often alongside state railways, and get no taxpayer support.
Intercity competition always benefits passengers, as on the Madrid-Barcelona link where fares have fallen while quality rises (except when power cuts bring all the high-speed trains to a halt).
Here in the UK, open access firms also run trains to destinations that state-run train operators choose not to serve direct – such as Hartlepool, just three hours from London by Grand Central.
The main achievement of open access firms, though, is to lure new customers to the railways. The best example is Lumo, which runs from London via Newcastle and Morpeth to Edinburgh. The First Group-owned company is in competition not just with LNER but also British Airways, easyJet and Ryanair – as well as people who might drive, or just stay at home.
Yet the fact that I could book that May Day trip through a rival train operator, and use my railcard, is baffling. It takes me back to the 1980s – before proper competition began on the airlines.
In 2025, I can search in a trice on a flight-comparison website such as Skyscanner and find the best flights from Manchester to Malaga. Then I book direct with whichever of easyJet, Jet2 and Ryanair offers the best deal. Such is the madness of Britain's open access regulations that state-run operators like LNER must sell tickets on rival firms such as Grand Central – and vice versa. Because I bought while LNER was offering a five per cent cashback deal on any train purchases, I saved a few pounds. Handy for me, unhelpful for Grand Central.
Open access operators' quest to use shrewd pricing to attract new passengers would be more successful were they not required to make their inventory available through other operators, to whom they must pay a few per cent in commission.
Then there's the railcard requirement. Can you imagine easyJet or Ryanair putting up with a rule that says: 'If somebody comes along who's under 31 or over 59, or happens to be travelling with their partner, or has a child with them, you must give them one-third off the price of a ticket.'
This arrangement makes a mockery of the fine art of yield management: extracting the most from every traveller while filling every seat. Grand Central, Lumo and Hull Trains might set a price of £60 for a ticket, only to find that those of us lucky enough to qualify for a railcard can buy it for just £40.
Even worse, two adults and two children with a Family & Friends railcard will be able to occupy four seats for barely half the regular fare.
So rigorous are the rules that open access operators cannot do the obvious and sensible thing and say: everyone must book online and use an e-ticket. Someone who insists on buying a paper ticket at a booking office, with all the extra cost that entails, gets the same deal.
Suggesting that passengers should pay more at the ticket office than online is deeply controversial – as is my belief that open access companies should be able to eliminate the half-price for children practice if they so wish. Yet the principle that all passengers occupying a seat – whether aged two, 22 or 102 – should pay the same fare was set by easyJet when the low-cost revolution began three decades ago.
All of this is relevant because Grand Central has revealed a cunning plan to launch trains from Newcastle to Brighton in December 2026. These will typically not be used by people wishing to travel from Newcastle to Brighton because it is much faster to take Lumo or LNER to London King's Cross, walk across the road to St Pancras and hop on a frequent Thameslink train to Brighton – just over four hours all in.
Grand Central's proposed train will follow a long and winding route via York, Sheffield, Derby, Birmingham New Street, Oxford, Reading and Gatwick airport. Clever pricing will make all the difference between profit and loss: you really don't want to sell someone a ticket from Durham to Darlington if it takes up space that would otherwise be filled by a passenger travelling from Tyneside to Birmingham.
Only by freeing companies from needless constraints will open access operators flourish as they should. That includes enticing people who might drive between York and Reading, and offering them a decent deal to take the train.
Given the glacial-to-zero progress that successive governments have made in rationalising fares, I have no expectation that this will happen in the next 19 months. But as with so many railway conventions: only when ministers have the courage to make decisions that may prove temporarily unpopular will travel by train flourish.