Title: An insider's guide to cheap rail tickets | Travel | The Guardian
Headings: An insider's guide to cheap tickets
Travel
An insider's guide to cheap tickets
Patrick Barkham
@patrick_barkham
Six journeys, six tricks
Tactics

Content: You've just forked out £219 to travel from Manchester to London, an 8.4% rise on last week's price. Has she? Or did she forage on a secret website when the moon was full and, with Venus in the ascendant, dig out a spectacularly cheap fare? Everyone has been hit by the latest increases in already high ticket prices. " We have the most expensive railway in Europe, and unless ministers act to enforce affordable fares, we will have a system that will soon be the preserve of the middle classes," says Gerry Doherty, general secretary of TSSA, the transport union. The union has found that passengers pay 55p for each of the 199 miles on the train between Manchester and London, but just 17p a mile between Paris and Calais. This year UK fares have risen by an average of 4.3% - 1% above inflation - but many popular routes, long and short, have been hit by far higher rises. A standard open return from London to Plymouth went up 12.6% to £214. These increases come in a labyrinthine fare structure that is a legacy of the privatisation of British Rail. Franz Kafka could not conjure up a more complex tale than the way we have come to pay for our seat on a train.