Blog – Passenger Railway Challenge
-
15 August 2017
Today we learned that rail fares will rise 3.6 per cent in January making it the biggest rise for five years. To put it into context, that means an average rise for commuters coming into London of £146; for commuters coming into Bristol an extra £72; and for commuters working in Birmingham an...
-
05 July 2017
Last week, on a hot summer’s evening, a group of rail campaigners gathered at St Pancras Station. After meetings, lots of email exchanges and careful drafting and redrafting, we had a final version of our six-point Better South Eastern Charter and were ready to hand it in to Department for...
-
05 July 2017
Building a new train station costs a fortune and takes an age. How can we make things quicker and easier so the worthwhile projects actually get built? We've just written a new guide which aims to do precisely this, helping good projects get on track.
-
09 May 2017
Campaigner Jo Rossi, a part-time commuter, wrote this blog about how discriminatory rail fare structures affects her - and thousands of other women and men too. This campaign features on Mumsnet.
-
28 March 2017
This week, the Government announced that the SouthWest Trains franchise will be taken over by First-MTR. South West Trains Watch hopes the new franchise will improve journeys for passengers in the region.
-
06 December 2016
It was billed as the great re-privatisation of the railways with the market ushered in to reign supreme over the tracks. But anyone hoping the Secretary of State was going to take a chainsaw to Network Rail or even summon the dark spirit of Railtrack will be disappointed.
-
15 November 2016
When Sophie Barber turned 16, her rail fare went up by 77%! Unhappy that she now had to pay an adult fare just to get to school, she took action and together with her friend Emily Stott, started the Childfare campaign. In this blog, Sophie reveals how the campaign started.
-
26 October 2016
Anyone searching on the Govia Thameslink website for information about student rail fares will soon discover an anomaly: the Cambridge Student Connect offer. This is a unique 50 per cent discount fare available to 16-18 year-olds in education or training, within Cambridgeshire. It means that...
-
13 October 2016
Last week the Office of Rail and Road published the outcome of their inquiry into the retail market for train tickets. The inquiry, which began two and half years ago, set out to examine how ticket sales could be more in tune with passenger interests. We have long campaigned for tickets to be...
-
15 September 2016
Fed-up passengers can now turn to the Consumer Rights Act.