Josh McCallion couldn’t believe his eyes when he bought a train ticket in Sydney. (Source: Instagram)
A British expat has been shocked to discover how much it costs to travel regionally in Australia. Josh McCallion moved over from the UK in November and has been keen on seeing some of the hotspots outside of Sydney.
He picked Newcastle as his first destination, which is about two-and-a-half hours away from the capital city, and couldn’t believe his eyes when he went to pay for the journey. The content creator told Yahoo Finance it’s a far cry from what he’d normally pay back home.
“We needed an excuse to get up there because we’ve heard it was nice,” he said.
“But when I looked at the train prices, I was just blown away, to be quite honest. In the UK, we just use the train because it’s just obscene.”
For a single, one-way trip for an adult passenger from Sydney to Newcastle, it cost McCallion just $7.46.
That’s an off-peak fare, with an on-peak costing slightly more at $10.66.
Those are the prices whether you’re buying the ticket just before the train leaves or weeks in advance.
However, in the UK it’s a very different story.
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McCallion gave the example of Newcastle to Derby as it has a similar two-and-a-half-hour journey.
Yahoo Finance checked the price on the National Rail site, and the cheapest ticket, which was also the fastest and left just after 10:30am, cost a whopping £93.70 or AUD$190.
That was for a train leaving on the same day at the time of writing, and only one-way.
The most expensive one-way ticket was a cool £132.40 (AUD$269.70), which left at 8:41am. That’s more than 25 times more expensive than Sydney to Newcastle, NSW.
The cheapest return ticket would set you back £128.90 ($262.55).
But some UK train tickets operate in the same way as airline prices, in that they can be much cheaper if you book in advance.
If you booked that same journey for a month away, the cheapest fare is only £70.80 (AUD$144).
If you book as far as possible in advance, which would be departing on December 16 at the time of writing, the cheapest fare is £38.10 (AUD$77.59)
To show just how outrageously expensive that is, it would be cheaper for someone in Newcastle, UK, to fly to Paris ($123) if they rocked up to the airport tomorrow (according to prices at the time of writing).
McCallion told Yahoo Finance this revelation about NSW train ticket prices has encouraged him to see more of the state.
“A lot of people have said to head up to the Blue Mountains by train,” he said.
“We don’t have a car yet, but the public transport is making us think whether we actually need one, which is quite a nice place to be, because in the UK, that would never have been an option.”
The UK train system, British Rail, was privatised back in 1993, which We Own It campaigner Cat Hobbs blamed as one of the big drivers in the incredibly high ticket prices.
“The 2011 McNulty report found that the UK’s fares cost roughly 30 per cent more than those of other railways in Europe. And our government is obsessed with passengers footing the bill,” she told The Guardian back in 2022.
“Rolling stock companies own the physical trains and lend their ‘sets’ out to operators.
“At one point during the pandemic, passenger numbers dropped to 1872 levels. The numbers haven’t recovered.”
Former general secretary of the Rail, Maritime and Trains Union, Mick Lynch, echoed this to the New Statesman two years ago saying that because the system is privatised, “a profit has to be paid out, reducing the scope for fare cuts”.
Continual maintenance costs on the ageing network can also influence ticket prices.
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