Charlbury Station parking charges

Sun 11 Sep 2016, 13:11

Christine,

A small number of major stations in London and big cities are directly managed by Network Rail - and it contracts Apcoa to run the car parks at these stations, which I assume is what the Apcoa website is trying to say.

We could go into the rights and wrongs of GWR's (and indeed the entire rail network's) fares structures or other aspects of their services forever and a day.

You may find Chiltern's offer at Oxford Parkway most attractive - it has to be as they need to get lots of people on their Oxford trains to help pay for the cost of rebuilding the line to Bicester - but many of their fares elsewhere can take some explaining - e.g.passengers at stations in Oxfordshire can pay more to get to London on the same train than passengers from Warwickshire and the West Midlands. Passengers from Banbury and further north can't buy an off-peak day return to London, so no different from Charlbury and the rest of the Cotswold Line, while passengers at Bicester pay just 10p less for a day return to Marylebone than Oxford Parkway passengers (and a great deal more if they want to park a car).

GWR has been offering cheap advance fares from Oxford for many years - due to all the M40 coach competition, not because of Chiltern. And people along the Cotswold Line complained for a long time that there weren't any advance fares available - the other side of that coin was the withdrawal of cheap day fares.

The CLPG urged GWR to retain them, but to no avail, as they said they were responding to requests from passengers and also bringing the route's fares structure into line with their other longer-distance services (although Network Railcard discounts still apply along with the Cotswold Line Railcard). They say take-up of advance tickets from Cotswold Line stations has been high and clearly their revenue has not suffered as a result of the changes, so I can't see them changing their mind.

However poorly the penalty fare situation was handled, it was an attempt to bring some consistency to the way in which ticketless travel is dealt with throughout the GWR area.

The fact of the matter is that it has always been an offence under railway bylaws to board a train without a ticket at a station where a ticket office is open or a working ticket machine is available - even if in the past some latitude was allowed on the Cotswold Line, due to the mix of staffed and unstaffed stations and the hours ticket offices are open and whether a ticket machines is provided or not.

That the C1 bus was withdrawn was down to low passenger numbers and the withdrawal of the county council subsidy. At Kingham station, the X8 to Chipping Norton has survived because more people use it and Pulhams believes it can continue to operate it profitably without a subsidy.