FlightGlobal.com
Home
Premium
Archive
Video
Images
Forum
Atlas
Blogs
Jobs
Shop
RSS
Email Newsletters
You are in:
Home
Aviation History
1960
1960 - 0479.PDF
MHLIRC9. OF THE WORLD Two aspects of railway modern- ization: new stations and new ideas for passenger comfort. Left, London Hood, Manchester. Right, an experimental coach FLIGHT, 8 April 1960 flexibility in tariff-making is an essential of profitable operation. This argument for a "refined" or sophisticated fares structure is not shared by C. J. Stevens, president of the British Independent Air Transport Association and managing director of BKS. His view is that—at any rate for the independent airlines operating domestic scheduled services-^—fares should be based on a constant revenue rate per mile, keeping an identical fare structure on all routes. Promotional and other special fares would be variants on the basic rate. The idea underlying this suggestion is that passengers "should be able to see for themselves the logic of the fares structure." Discussion of the independents' fares is pertinent at the present time because it is one of the matters that will have to be considered by the new Air Transport Licensing Board, who will undertake for both BEA and the independents the task of determining the fare to be charged when application is made to operate a route. The system at present is that the AT AC considers the fare proposed by independent airline applicants only and either approves it, rejects it or demands that it be modified. Nevertheless, it can be said with confidence that the domestic air fare position is not likely to remain static. Indeed, frequent changes are likely to be made by the corporation in their attempts to reconcile traffic, capacity and cost structure as means of obtain- ing a profitable operation. The present situation may be briefly summarized as follows: — Basic return fare, all routes, carries a round-trip discount of 10 per centon twice the single fare. There is no fixed differential between first and tourist, but first-class fares are generally about 20 per cent moreexpensive. Trunk routes Normal tourist return fares valid for 12 months: about4ld to 5d per mile. Fifteen-day winter excursion 20-25 per cent less, about 3 |d per mile. Special eight-day excursion valid for winter week-ends, 40 per cent less, about 2\ to 3d per mile. Holiday routes (London to Jersey) Basic and maximum fare: over9Jd per mile, applies to summer Saturdays. Monthly return (summer, except Saturdays), under 8d. Fifteen-day excursion, available Friday,Sunday and Monday, about 16 per cent less and for Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday travel this is reduced a further 20 per cent to under 6Jd. Comparable fares Glasgow - Jersey are: under 6d, just over 5d andunder 4Jd; and Isle of Man - Manchester, just under 9Jd, under 7$d and about 5|d. Social services Typical revenue rate, about 8d per mile. Fifteen-dayfare, about 6Jd. Two- or three-day-validity winter fare from Islands to mainland: return fare at single fare price. Flying Scotsmen From the railways the same question about diversion of traffic as put to Lord Douglas (see page 483) bring different answers. There has been some diversion, the British Transport Commission say, and they are relatively sensitive to it. It has been particularly noticeable in recent years on the trunk route between London and Glasgow, where day rail traffic is said to be on the decline. British Railways' 10-year history of passenger carryings, in thousands of million passenger miles It would be appropriate here to quote figures to substantiate British Railways' impression that while traffic on the London - Glasgow route has fallen off by day, it has in- creased by night, and rail trunks—London - Newcastle, London - Edin- •has gained some ground. But O 1948 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 traffic on other burgh ami London - Manchester- the astonishing fact is that other than for the current year, figures for domestic trunk rail services, either of traffic carried or of seats offered, are simply not available. Statistics to the observer are the raw materials with which any situation picture may be painted, and to brush in the back- ground to the railway scene without them is to risk presenting a distorted image. But something can be made of those figures which are available, and the capacity figures in column 2 throw an interesting light on the effect of air competition on trunk route passenger traffic. It can be taken as significant that the number of seats on through services on the route London - Glasgow is now well below that offered on the other Scottish r6ute to Edinburgh, and the low load-factor on this route—the only rail trunk to tall below 50 per cent—is an indicator at least that the service is somewhat over-scheduled. On the other hand, although London - Manchester BEA capacity is to be doubled this summer in response to some local pressure, the railways claim that their share has not grown less. Service Euston-Glasgow Euston-Liverpool London-Manchester King's Cross-Newcastle King's Cross-Edinburgh Total number of scat* provided 2.556 4.702 9,942 3,400 4,982 Load Factor 47.3 58.67 55.0 69.7 57.5 Much of the demand for trunk-route seats on weekdays is from business traffic, and examples quoted by the railways' reinforce their claim that on many routes the total flow of passengers is increasing and that their share is generally keeping pace. But they do not seriously claim anywhere to be gaining fresh traffic on the longer routes where the effects of air travel are becoming felt. (As a corollary, railway modernization is claiming an advan- tage on shorter routes over its other fixed-track competitor, road transport.) The railways see their future role in British domestic transport as a twofold effort: intensive development of short haul travel, on which they hope to beget traffic as modernization plans are implemented and, they hope, continued growth of long haul. From a position in which they carry much more than nine-tenths of the nation's trunk route travellers, they say that there is "plenty of room" for both rail and air. Yet it seems that the pinpricks of competition may be being felt; and the opinion has been expressed that some form of overall control—a much wider extension of the informal railway-airline discussion that there is now, or meetings at a more formal level—might be "very helpful in avoiding wasteful competition." The railways' plans for modernization are a story in them- selves but, briefly, technical changes are designed to make trunk route travel more comfortable and substantially faster, first for businessmen's trains and ultimately for all who travel. There are no plans for reducing fares, although it has been said that long-haul services could break even at a revenue rate of about +d per mile. Railway ideas are thus almost diametrically opposed to those of BEA, whose services are unlikely to become more comfortable when "no-frills" high-density seating is introduced, will almost certainly become cheaper as traffic increases, and stand more to gain from speeding up processes on the ground than from anything except significantly faster journey times in the air. And although modernization would have come about irrespec- tive of competition from the air, some significance may be read into the sequence in which British Railways specialized diesel- Pullman trains—cream stock for the new programme—are being introduced. The favoured first route is London to Manchester, and although it is said that air competition has not influenced British Railways' choice—new equipment for this route "is a development in itself'—it is.difficult for the air transport observer not to believe that this has played a part. Subsequently diesel-Pullmans will be introduced on the London to Birmingham and London to Bristol routes, and when more experience has been obtained between London and Glasgow and London and Edinburgh. Journey times are to be markedly reduced, as shown in the table below: — Service Euston-Glasgow Euston-Liverpool London-Manchester King's Cross-Newcastle King's Cross-Edinburgh Pracent hr min 7 15 4 16 4 14 5 2 7 20 After modernization hr min 6 40 3 8 3 5 4 7 6 11 The significance of these reductions in time is not easy to gauge; they may possibly be the last that the railway service in the United Kingdom will ever achieve. Last year, British Railways operated "stripped" fast trains to Glasgow as an experiment
Sign up to
Flight Digital Magazine
Flight Print Magazine
Airline Business Magazine
E-newsletters
RSS
Events
