Neil Pickford finds the train puts him under strain
The other week I sent my son to Germany.
Oh, he'd not done anything wrong – particularly - but people I'd met through Beverley Minster had invited him across and, for one reason or another, it seemed a good idea.
With all arrangements the other side of the North Sea being taken care of by his kindly hosts we only had to organise getting him there in the first place. Rather foolishly I thought the tricky part would be the flying – and my heart sank when I realised he had to go from Manchester Airport (which I hate) and use Ryanair (which numerous anecdotes had warned me to avoid if at all possible).
Gritting my teeth I opened the Ryanair website and was surprised to find it was a simple process; After just a few minutes I had booked an outward bound and return flight for only £40, with no hidden extras.
Good, I thought. The rest will be simple.
Well, let me tell you here and now that, if there'd been a practical alternative to booking a train ticket I'd have taken it.
I've found this before: one strange day I needed to get from Beverley to North Thorne by rail – one way. According to the internet and the guard it was actually £2 cheaper to get one ticket from Beverley to Hull and then another to North Thorne than it would have been to buy one for the whole route.
And let's not overlook the fact it cost £22 and took more than 90 minutes to do a journey that a car would cover in 40 minutes.
So perhaps I wasn't too surprised to find that the cheapest return rail trip I could find on the internet was 50 per cent higher than the Ryanair part of the journey – and the tickets were cheaper if I bought them separately rather than in one.
However, when I went to the ticket office at Paragon I found the websites were talking cobblers; I was pleasantly surprised to get the whole trip for £30 – so there's another good lesson in life: don't believe everything you read on the internet, folks.
On the actual day the train from Hull left 10 minutes late and was much later getting into Manchester. My son was starting to worry he'd miss the plane, but Ryanair staff plucked him from the check-in queue and whisked him aboard – which was nice.
The return flight was uneventful and landed early but this was no help. Apparently on Saturday evenings there are no direct trains to Hull so passengers have to change at Leeds. This then involves sitting around with a cup of boiling coffee for over one hour while it cools until the next scheduled Hull train is ready which - thanks to careful timetabling and coordination – arrives in Paragon exactly three minutes after the final train to Beverley has departed.
That was irrelevant as this particular train pulled in five minutes later than scheduled anyway.
Now, frankly, that entire experience, of uncoordinated selling, confusing prices, lousy connections and unreliable running did absolutely nothing to sell rail travel to my family.
When Ryanair makes it easier to book online, is cheaper, gets you to your destination early and offers you a better customer experience then, frankly, it's about time you pulled your socks up.
I love railways, I try to defend them whenever necessary, but it's no flaming good if the railways themselves then let you down. Perhaps it's time to stop campaigning to reopen the Beverley to York railway line. Let's all start asking for a Ryanair to provide the service instead.
After all, there's a big field to the west of Beverley that would be ideal for an airport.
You can read more of Neil's various meanderings at his website • ThePickfordPapers
