Rail passengers face fresh ticket price misery: Millions to be hit by 4.6% hike from tomorrow... while thousands of journeys are cancelled at the last minute every weekend
Rail passengers are set to be hit with a 4.6 per cent hike in prices from tomorrow - despite thousands of journeys being cancelled at the last minute every weekend.
Fees will be increased and so will most railcards - for the first time in 12 years - with some going up by almost 17 per cent from £30 to £35.
It comes as households also face bill rises next month, including energy, water, and council tax.
The hike is 'another blow' to those hardest hit by the cost of living, Silviya Barrett of Campaign for Better Transport told the Mirror.
This comes as figures show that 554 trains have been cancelled every Sunday since August last year.
This means that more than four per cent of the timetabled journeys were axed on the day.
On Saturdays, the number remains at 672 when there are more scheduled services.
These numbers do not include changes made to the timetable as a result of planned engineering works.
According to Campaign for Better Transport's analysis of annual rail season tickets, 12 common routes for commuters to London will now cost more than £6,000 a year.
Ms Barrett from the group which promotes sustainable transport told the newspaper: 'For many, the rise will be significant, and it's especially disappointing that even railcards are going up.
'As the government works to reform the railways, it must review the way fares are set and make them more affordable or risk driving people off rail for good.'
Figures show that Northern, the government-run train operator, is the worst performing at weekends, the Times reports.
Of the 112,751 weekend trains scheduled to run, it cancelled 11,407 services - around 10 per cent/.
Meanwhile, Avanti West Coast was the second-worst, calling off 730 of its 11,744 - just over six per cent of scheduled services.
For Great Western Railway (GWR), which runs services between London and the southwest of England and south Wales, cancelled 4,280 of 73,661.
Northern and GWR both have a lack of staff and have said that services have been affected by infrastructure failures.
For the best operators, Hull trains came on top as the best performing, cancelling only one train out of 635 scheduled services.
Lumo was second-best, cancelling three of its 520 weekend service.
A train source told the Times that Sundays tend to be 'bumpty' because of employment contracts for drivers which do not include Sunday as a working day.
They added that companies have also said that staffing weekends has become harder due to Labour's pay bump to train drivers.
It was backdated to 2022 and given without any strings or modernisation to working arrangements, such as bringing Sundays into seven-day contracts.
A spokesperson for Avanti told the Times that it recognises its customers deserve a 'reliable service' and it is working with partners to 'make sure our operation runs better, day in day out'.
It said it has worked with Network Rail to bring down the number of cancellations.
Meanwhile, GWR said it is 'really sorry' to customers affected by the poor performance on Sundays last yea,r blaming it on a 'combination of issues' including storms, late-notice engineering work and crew availability.
Adding: 'It has always been a myth that these issues were about train operators not having enough staff, and the rapid improvement in performance since December with the same staffing levels clearly bears that out.'
