The tyranny of the train companies

Have you ever been in trouble for a mistake and thought, “everyone might be overreacting here”? You’re not alone. Up and down this grey little country, the laypeople are increasingly frustrated by the unrewarding outcomes of a life spent following the rules, especially when faced with harsh punishment for the most minor indiscretions. 

Nowhere is this more keenly felt than within the confines of our monopolized transit systems. With few options to get you from A to B, thousands of people squeeze themselves onto tubes, trains, and buses, totally at the mercy of the ever-powerful transport companies. Rather than sharing the mutually gratifying relationship of a willing consumer and chosen provider, rail companies are morphing into tyrannical civic figures that control a necessary part of our lives whilst pretending to be providers of a luxury. 

Train guards and revenue protection teams act like the strictest teachers in school. Whilst their chastisement of passengers without correct tickets is often warranted, the naughty kids still jump the barriers and evade fares without a trace. Accordingly, they come across as farcically hyperbolic when they send letters threatening prosecution to those customers who make an error and board with inappropriate tickets but are still polite enough to hand over their details when asked to do so. Mr Railway cannot evict tenacious troublemakers from his class, so he takes it out on the swot who dared pass notes during his lesson. Rules are rules, of course, but like the swot, an overly chastised passenger is left with a sense of hot injustice — the true lesson being that he should avoid owning up to mistakes in the future.

Funny comparison, you might think, and it made for a good post on X when I responded to a fellow user’s post showing a letter from Thameslink informing him that they would be taking his case to the Magistrates Court. His offence? The slick criminal boarded a train to East Croydon and bought a ticket for that journey on the Trainline app, but only after he and the train had left the station. His error was that the ticket was valid for the following train on account of the fact that he could no longer buy a ticket for an already departed train and so he chose one on the same route for equal value. This error prompted the Revenue Protection Inspector at East Croydon station to cancel the ticket without reimbursement and take his details. Naturally, this £15 offence, an amount that Thameslink ended up receiving from him anyway, inspired the company to ask that he be handed the maximum penalty possible, the options including a fine, imprisonment and a criminal record.

Now, we all know that rules exist for a reason. As the letter states, travel fraud costs the rail industry over £240 million a year, a problem which has inspired a zero-tolerance policy at Thameslink. Similarly, between 2023 and 2024, Transport for London invested £22m into revenue enforcement teams across the London Underground network, with the commissioner proudly stating that they had identified 414 people who habitually avoid fares amounting to over £360k total. As someone who briefly worked in an accounting department, I can’t say I quite see the benefit of that opex when considering that only £1.3m in penalty charges were successfully collected. Still, perhaps that is cynical of me, and the return on investment can be seen in greater safety for transport staff or a tighter ship all round. Sadly, this also seems unlikely, as workplace abuse incidences were up by 5 per cent in the same year.

… this new age of “anarcho-tyranny” is growing more obvious and frustrating to live in

No worker deserves to be mistreated or abused for doing their job, or indeed for not doing it. But, in the words of those replying to my post on X, this new age of “anarcho-tyranny” is growing more obvious and frustrating to live in. We face a decline in the quality of our public and private services, a tightening of rules and an overzealous approach to punishing the trivial issues because institutions seem incapable of combating the real problems they face. It is simpler to reclaim lost funds by squeezing them from someone who is obedient enough to pay an excessive fine, than it is to prevent people from shoving through barriers, hiding in toilets or arguing with train staff before storming off at the next stop. 

… these increasing instances of absurd severity are contributing to the erosion of the relationship between Brits and the trains that connect us

A clear case of exaggerated punishment went semi-viral at the end of last year. Sam Williamson, a 22 year old man who regularly used his 16-25 railcard when buying tickets on Northern, was left terrified that he would be prosecuted because he had applied the railcard discount to a fare of under £12 before 10am on a weekday in September. I mean, who could be so silly as to not realise that your railcard’s validity depended on the exact day, month, time and value? It’s right there in section 4, point 4.5.3 in the T+Cs on the railcard website, a site that you only visit once every 3 years when renewing. Not committing that to memory and simply assuming that it was allowed because the ticket booking service let you apply for the railcard, is basically the same as approaching the families of the train staff and stealing food directly out of their mouths. Sam, you should be ashamed of yourself — stay after class and think about what you have done.

On a more serious note, these increasing instances of absurd severity are contributing to the erosion of the relationship between Brits and the trains that connect us. We can find examples of this anarcho-tyranny in articles from as far back as 2015, with the Guardian’s Patrick Collinson proclaiming that the rail companies’ approach to penalty fares contradicted the legal tradition of the United Kingdom, labelling the accused as “guilty until proven innocent”. A mighty accusation but one grounded in truth. Just as many of us will have had a teacher deem it unnecessary for us to give our version of events when being punished, so too have many grown adults been shrunken down to their younger form when these puffed up threats of legal action are posted through their letter box.

It’s all a bit much isn’t it? Especially for the sake of commuting to work, in a time when you could avoid the office all together and complete your spreadsheets whilst sitting on the sofa in your pants. Not something I would do, but it certainly sounds preferable to the risk of paying £500 for a £3 mistake, or something equally ridiculous. Human beings are flawed, imperfect creatures but we should not be goading one another to explode from frustration. It may be easier to gloat about “the rules” and land someone with a huge legal issue under the guise of fairness, but the truly arrogant people who take advantage of civil society’s will to trust the public, seem to avoid punishment on a regular basis. If this balance is not corrected and the real issues addressed, then the teachers may be hated by their students forever.