Network Fail

7 quid. 7 fucking quid. I was warned very far in advance that it would happen, but I was still pissed when it actually did. Walking up to that ticket machine on a dark, dreary midweek night, I knew what the screen was going to tell me but I still reacted with surprise when it told me in its silly font: 'Warwick Parkway to Coventry. 1 adult. Anytime Day Single. £7.00.' 

Trains are probably one of the most mundane subjects you could possibly talk about so if you are bored, go to Twatter or porn or something. If you are one of the numerous jilted masses extremely pissed off at everything ever, grab a bottle of gin and read on.

Not advised: The Punctuation Drinking Game. 

Last year, that ticket cost me £6.40. Now, a rise of sixty pence is not much. At all. Inflation has been happening since man first learned that pointy stone kill mammoth and, in a small way, the rise is understandable. The railways are currently undergoing upgrades and the government foots 32% of the bill for this. My problem is that the quality of travel is absolutely not worth what we pay for it. 

Of course there is always foregoing the train fare if barriers are open but sod's law states very clearly that the one time I do this, there will me a miserly conductor on board just waiting to frisk me for my ticket. There is always hiding in the toilet but have you ever been in a train toilet? You know people and how gross they all are? Yeah.

My journey back from Warwick to Coventry involves getting on a Cross Country train from Leamington. This train is always late. It can range from between a petty five minutes to a forehead vein bursting half an hour. I’m guessing it gets held up by hundreds of students at Oxford who have decided in their privileged minds that the train track is now a cycle lane as well (there are A LOT of bicycles in Oxford) and the driver takes twenty minutes to pick the posh pricks out from beneath the train wheels. 

This particular train was on time. Because it's not in the UK. Zing. DfT, I zinged you, recognize!  

There was one day before Christmas at the height of shopping panic; I decided it would be extremely clever to get a 5.25 Saturday service. I expected it to be busy but with all the investment going into our fantastic rail services I believed that they would add an extra carriage to the train therefore relieving the other carriages from the duress of overcrowding. They took one away. Four carriages. On a train that goes between Manchester and Birmingham. At Christmas.

It mystifies me how the chancellor can say that the economy is on its way to recovery and yet I’m still picking dead moths out from the note section of my wallet. Yes the economy is doing okayish but people are not as their wages are not going up with the rate of inflation… some people have been stuck in jobs for years without any sort of pay rise. It’s utterly nonsensical. To be fair, this is actually the first time in years that the rail fares have actually gone with inflation. In the last couple of years the government just chucked a dart at a dartboard to work out the rise. '180! 180 percent.' 'Yeah that sounds about right.'

Fuck it. I'm getting a car.