Someone who works in the industry will doubtless put me in my place, but it just seems bonkers. Surely it’s the train operators squeezing the last possible drops out of the customer before they lose the farcical franchises? Same must go for the heavy handed way they are threatening court action rather than a fine against people who have failed to get the right ticket. We’re meant to be encouraging public transport and active travel, but price it completely out of possibility for most people, targeting purely those who can expense it (though someone in the economy is paying for it). How can a trip to the Wolves for two adults and two kids be ca. four times more expensive by rail as it is for fuel in the car? Nuts.
Privatisation was bad for a lot of reasons but the main problem is just pure capacity in the rail network, and that's the result of a lot of bad decisions compounding over decades really. Nationalisation won't do anything to help without a lot more investment in capacity as well - and that investment was dropping well before privatisation.
Beeching has this reputation of culling loads of cute little rural branch lines, which he
did, but he wasn't actually that wrong in doing so - in a lot of places out in the sticks, buses are genuinely a better solution for people who can't/won't drive. (That ofc does also require implementing decent rural bus services, but that's a whole other UK state failure of its own.) The real problem is that he thought the rail network should be cut back to focus on two primary objectives: long-distance intercity services, and short-distance suburban commuter trains. The lines which we lost were the ones carrying primarily anything else (like, say, as public transport within large urban areas/between nearby towns of similar sizes without being commuting targets in themselves), or which were seen as providing an unnecessary duplication of another main line - lines like the Great Central (duplicated the MML), the Varsity line (mostly a freight line by the 60s, and freight was being pushed onto lorries), or the Woodhead line (duplicated the Hope Valley line, although ironically enough Beeching thought HV should have been closed in favour of keeping Woodhead open).
The UK rail network now has loads of crunch points where main line spines - and especially the WCML - are trying to handle every kind of train service at once, and of course they're completely full, with no way to increase one type of service without simultaneously limiting others. Eg: I go visit my in-laws in Suffolk regularly, and Greater Anglia makes a big song and dance of recent upgrades to the EAML making "Norwich in 90" possible from Liverpool St. Except they can only do that twice per hour with trains that make only 2-3 stops on the way. Each of those trains is then followed two minutes later in the timetable by another Norwich train, except it makes every stop along the way and takes nearly twice as long overall. But you have to "bunch up" trains like this, otherwise your fast intercities will end up stuck behind the slow stoppers. Got to give yourself as much of a window as possible. But the end result is that all our main line timetables have these weird lumpy windows of no trains in them, just to make it viable to get, say, from London to Edinburgh in a reasonable time.
tl;dr of it all is that unless we build HS2 in full there's no way to fix this - by taking all the express trains off the existing network and handing the tracks over to stopping services - and it's just going to get worse until it gets better, because the existing infrastructure is already pushed to the max. And until that happens, prices will stay high because the demand is high, and there will always be enough people willing to pay.
