jagardner1984
Member
- Joined
- 11 May 2008
- Messages
- 715
Don’t disagree with you in the central point at all.I'm not going to go any further as I don't want to drift the thread away from the core topic. It will be interesting to see how the whole thing is handled operationally as we go forward and now that they are slightly more directly responsible and accountable for it if they listen to the views of those of us and there are good few in this category who want to be able to use it as a viable affordable option for overnight travel between particularly rural Scotland and London and not as a five-star hotel on wheels
However, with the service broadly full at current pricing …..
Whilst charging £4.50 for a supermarket yoghurt ….
And still the subsidy per journey has been reported in some quarters at £164 per journey - as discussed in Parliament …
It is hard to see where the economies come at such a scale as to achieve the very laudable goal of improving the affordability of fares. Popular whilst sacking CEO’s might be - you’ll need to find an awful lot of them to bring down that £164 by much.
To be honest - much as I think some of the old school sleeper hosts were absolutely brilliant - my interaction with them now generally involves them ticking a sheet on a clipboard, and being handed a bottle of warm orange juice in the morning. Sometimes there is a hello with Either of these interactions. I’m not sure how many hosts are on a Lowlander service - and obviously the club car is I assume revenue generating - but I wonder whether a Scotrail revenue protection doing the ticket check - and a drinks voucher for some partner cafe or other - might offer some opportunities for some roles to shift to other parts of CS / Scotrail. Or indeed whether running Glasgow an hour earlier via Edinburgh (so all shunting happens in one place) might also bring some savings whilst still offering reasonable timings.
I’d hate to see it go - but clearly there are many demands on the subsidy available to Scotland’s railways more generally. I suspect however that the unique nature of the service and its appeal to tourists … that many many of them bring an awful lot more than £164 into Scotland’s economy, not all of which would seamlessly transfer to Ryanair.
“Subsidy” is always a very complex picture.