A deceptively simple product: what we lose when walk-up fares go

Flexible walk-up fares bundle together a small set of individually forgettable freedoms that form more than the sum of their parts: they allow the railway to carry the uncertainty of passengers’ travel needs. In this blog post I argue that reasonably-priced walk-up fares are fundamentally incompatible with purely demand-responsive pricing, which instead transfers uncertainty from the railway to the passenger. It may give a short-term revenue boost but could risk long-term growth. This is a topic that deserves careful consideration as the fares policy for GBR is developed.

Fares simplification came early to the railway

When the Liverpool & Manchester Railway (L&M) opened in 1830 it ran just one route, all travel had to be booked at least 24 hours in advance, and bookings were binding to a specific train.¹ Such an arrangement probably does not sound that surprising to the passenger of today, although for the vast majority of the railway’s history it likely would have done: that initial complicated system did not last long and was soon superseded by a much simpler and more flexible one, which stayed fully dominant from the 1840s until the 1980s.

The reasons for this seem to have been that the initial system was simply not scalable, due to the rapid growth of passenger traffic and the opening of connecting lines. The founding of the Railway Clearing House in 1842 and the widespread introduction of the Edmondson ticket system led to standardisation on small card tickets that could be purchased on a “walk-up” basis to any “booking through station”, with revenue shared among railway companies based on the mileage travelled on each company’s tracks.²

Back to 1830?

The availability of reasonably-priced walk-up fares is however no longer universal, since the staged removal by LNER of Off-Peak and Super Off-Peak Returns (starting in 2020) followed by Super Off-Peak Singles between London and Newcastle / Edinburgh (in 2024), as a prerequisite for introducing non-refundable, purely demand-responsive pricing. This was announced as a 2-year trial but has remained in place for over 30 months now, and in the absence of any other guidance on what fares policy will look like under GBR, it seems reasonable to assume this is the direction things are headed.

Of course, modern technology solves a lot of the complications that would otherwise arise from going back to an 1830 L&M-style system based around train-specific bookings. In particular, well-designed mobile phone apps can make choosing trains, picking a seat and even moving trains within a flex period (LNER offers the 70min Flex for an extra fee – currently a maximum of £20/£25 for standard/1st class, according to the fares database) many times easier than the old days when it would require a trip to a station booking office. And advanced computer reservation systems such as S3 Passenger from Sqills (used by all GB train operators) make it straightforward to manage demand and optimise revenue.

And I would also readily concede the point that cheap advance fares, where passengers can trade flexibility in return for committing to travel on a less popular service that has spare capacity, are a genuine benefit to passengers – but this is nothing new. What has been removed in the LNER trial is walk-up flexibility.

Are we losing something that’s worth defending?

Just because it’s possible to go back to the old system, does it mean we should? Are we in danger of quietly losing something that’s actually worth defending?

Searching online and in the press, I can find plenty of outrage regarding what LNER euphemistically refer to as “Simpler Fares”, with complaints about higher prices and difficulty booking certain trains due to the lack of walk-up fares. This is not really a surprise; the importance of reasonably-priced walk-up fares has long been recognised.

The landmark 2006 report “How fair are the fares?” from the House of Commons Transport Committee contains a very thorough analysis of the then-current fares structure on the railway.³ In evidence to the committee, the East Midlands Passenger Transport Users’ Forum submitted that availability of walk-up fares is essential

to maintain rail’s attraction to the passenger for whom the car is always “walk up”

The committee agreed, noting that the price premium for walk-up fares was a concern and concluding that:

The ability to turn up and go without notice is a vital characteristic of the railway. Without walk-on fares, the railways would have no hope of competing with road travel.

Such defences of walk-up fares (a deceptively simple product, I would submit) seem relatively hard to find. Amidst all the criticism of “Simpler Fares”, I have found surprisingly little commentary about what it actually is that is being lost. What is so great about walk-up fares? This is the gap I aim to address in this blog post.

The walk-up fare: a bundle of insurance policies

Walk-up fares offer a package of benefits. Each one is small, making it easy to dismiss in isolation, but taken together they form a compelling argument:

• simple and quick to purchase, no need to select a train
• no need to purchase until you’re sure you’ll make the journey
• a knowable price: the reassurance of knowing in advance exactly how much your journey will cost
• free insurance against missing your intended train – just take a later one
• flexibility to change your plans on-the-go: stay longer at your destination, stop off on the way back etc.

Another way of thinking of this is simply as insurance against multiple different types of uncertainty. Most people will make use of any of these individual “insurance policies” relatively rarely, and that makes it easy for the industry to dismiss these benefits. But taken together they are more than the sum of their parts: walk-up fares let the railway carry your uncertainty, so you don’t have to.

There is a symmetry here: when the passenger has flexibility, from the train operator’s point of view there is less certainty in the demand for individual trains. But that can be turned around: the railway can transfer this demand-uncertainty risk to the passenger. The well-established way of doing this is to use demand-responsive pricing or put more bluntly, “to price off demand”.

Matching Demand to Capacity?

Pricing off demand is probably very tempting: matching capacity to uncertain walk-up demand is a hard problem to start with, made much harder by the fragmentation (and ensuing rigidity of process) within the rail industry. And software providers such as Sqills come to the table with a persuasive argument, offering “smarter, data-driven decisions that help maximise revenue” using dynamic pricing. ⁴

When walk-up fares are set at a reasonable level, they act as a limit for the highest demand-responsive price that can be charged. This can both lead to overcrowding (e.g. Sunday afternoons on many routes) and constrain the revenue that can be earned at popular times. This is why LNER needed to abolish all walk-ups (except the most expensive Anytime Singles): purely demand-responsive pricing would otherwise not have been possible.

In short, reasonably-priced walk-up fares are fundamentally incompatible with purely demand-responsive pricing; they can’t co-exist.

Simpler Fares – for whom?

The trial of non-refundable, purely demand-responsive fares on LNER has been heavily promoted as “simpler”, but I would pose the question: simpler for whom?

Is it simpler for the passenger, who now must:

• Decide, days or weeks ahead, exactly when they want to travel
• Limit themselves to a single train, or a 70-minute window around it
• Endure a separate journey-planning step before every ticket purchase
• Gamble on the best time to buy to get a suitable price
• Check departures either side of the intended itinerary, to see if a 70min Flex for a different train is cheaper (which happens surprisingly often)
• Give up the right to change their mind
• Carry the risk of their own lateness

And do all the above for both outward and return journeys, since flexible, open returns are no longer available. Or is it simpler for the train operator, who:

• ­No longer needs to carefully match time restrictions to demand, nor comply with fares regulation
• Outsources pricing and demand management to an external platform
• Gains train-by-train control of passenger loading and maximises the revenue from each train

It’s clear that the train operator has gained a lot of simplicity, and I would argue that it’s at the expense of the passenger, who has forfeited all the little “insurance policies” which arise from the availability of reasonably-priced walk-up fares. Or looking at it another way, the complexity of managing uncertain demand has been transferred from the TOC to the passenger.

Prices have also increased. Based on LNER’s own figures,⁵ on at least 35% of off-peak journeys, the cheapest fare that lets the passenger flex to a different itinerary without paying the difference now costs at least as much as the old Super Off-Peak Single did (see derivation of this figure in the box). In the cases where the 70min Flex costs less than the old Super Off-Peak Single, it’s true that a meaningful new price point now exists; if this had been an addition rather than a replacement, it would have been a genuine win. But as it stands, the 70min Flex restores only a tiny slice of what walk-up offered, for a price that might be cheaper – if anything it complicates rather than simplifies. Compare this to the Super Off-Peak Single, which gave off-peak flexibility across the entire day – and was refundable in the event you didn’t travel at all.

Retailers sell flexibility back to the passenger…

The arguments in favour of walk-up fares are partly subjective, and some of what I’ve said so far could be dismissed as just opinion. But there is real-world, commercial evidence that the lack of reasonably-priced walk-up fares is creating a demand for what was taken away: with the previous “Cancel For Any Reason” and current “Trainline Flex” policies, Trainline is attempting to sell back to passengers some of the flexibility that they would get “for free” if walk-up fares were available at a reasonable price. (Technically, it’s priced in – but with the premium spread across millions of passengers, the cost will be miniscule.)

These insurance policies allow passengers to obtain a refund of the price of the advance fare (but not of the fee for the insurance), should their plans change and they no longer need to travel at all (note: my understanding is that the fare is not actually refunded; the cost is rather absorbed by the insurance provider). There is however a deadline to submit a refund request; it was recently tightened from 15 minutes to 2 hours before departure of the first booked train. ^{6, 7}

Rail unions are known for making the argument that third party retailers drain away revenue that could have been retained in the industry: in general I disagree with this, but here we have an example where it’s undoubtedly true: if flexible walk-up fares, with their in-built “bundle of insurance policies” were available at a reasonable price, there would be no market for Trainline Flex! It suggests to me that the balance of flexibility among the products the train operators currently offer is not optimal.

…while the industry continues to remove it

Until 1 April 2026, “cancel for any reason” had in fact been an in-built benefit of all walk-up fares: an unused ticket could be refunded for a fee (max. £5 since 1 April 2024, before that £10 ⁸), up to 28 days from the expiry of its validity. But the passenger-unfriendly changes which took effect in April mean this is no longer possible – a refund is not available once the fare has theoretically become valid for travel at midnight ⁹ (irrespective of the train on which the passenger intended to use it). Thus in one way, walk-up fares have now become less flexible than train-specific advance fares, which can be changed up to the time of departure or (if you purchased Trainline Flex) refunded up to two hours before.

There is a theme here: the flexibility and insurance benefits that have historically made walk-up fares a compelling choice are being chipped away, one at a time. Open returns (on LNER), flexible refunds, and so on: taken in itself each one is small enough to dismiss, but I would argue that what we’re losing is greater than the sum of its parts. It feels as if walk-up fares could be on the verge of becoming an endangered species.

Competing philosophies of rail travel

I created the BR Fares website in 2012 with the aim of making the flexibility inherent in walk-up fares explicit, clear and browsable on the internet, since I felt that there was an information gap worth filling: the heavy focus on journey planning on other sites was disguising the true flexibility of many fares. Unfortunately this has only become worse over the years – the philosophy that currently appears to be winning is that every fare sale should involve an initial journey planning step, and result in a fare that is bound either to a specific itinerary, or to a narrow time band around it.

I’m not sure if this is by accident or design, but to me it seems to expose a dichotomy: either

• you purchase a flexible fare, it’s valid by multiple itineraries, potentially over multiple routes, and it’s the job of train companies to provide reliable services to get you from your origin to your destination, or
• you choose from a limited selection of itineraries offered by an algorithm, it’s your responsibility to make sure you follow the chosen itinerary exactly, if there’s disruption it’s not always clear what alternative options your ticket is valid on.

Similarly to the discussion around simpler fares, one of these “travel philosophies” is clearly in favour of the passenger, and the other not so much.

Risking long-term growth?

There’s a less-discussed subtext to “simpler fares”, and it would be disingenuous not to also address it here: under the nationalised railway, there is a clear imperative for the DfT to increase revenue in order to reduce subsidy. One way might be to grow passenger numbers; another way might be to derive more revenue from the existing passengers. I don’t think the two are incompatible, but it appears to me that purely demand-responsive pricing offers a politically convenient way to increase fares, since it side-steps the annual headlines over regulated fare rises: the increases are opaque, and distributed across millions of passenger journeys.

It may also hinder long-term growth. The problem is that purely demand-responsive pricing is fundamentally incompatible with reasonably-priced walk-up fares. And abolishing walk-ups throws away so many benefits – the risk transfer, the bundle of insurance policies – that I suspect the short-term revenue gain comes at a longer-term cost. A less convenient, harder to use railway with no guarantee of an affordable price will likely be more difficult to grow.

A constructive compromise

I would advocate for a compromise solution. Purely demand-responsive pricing is too blunt an instrument; instead, properly address the problems that led to it. If it turns out that fares regulation is keeping prices at unreasonably low levels, loosen it. Restrict the Super Off-Peak (e.g. add a Sunday afternoon restriction, even bar its use totally in the mid-week peak). Re-add an Off-Peak fare at a higher price point, but valid in the shoulder peak. Two levels of peak restrictions are not hard for passengers to understand when it’s communicated clearly – the concept has existed for decades.

With some work, I believe pricing and fares can be tailored to give proper market segmentation, which would serve the twin aims of growing the railway and increasing revenue. There is no need to abandon the walk-up railway, and adjustments like re-introducing Off-Peak fares are not radical changes; the only constraint is fares regulation, which is entirely within DfT control. As GBR forms its fares policy, I’m asking that the quiet, easily-overlooked benefits of walk-up fares are considered honestly, and not discarded by default simply because no one is advocating for them loudly enough.

1. Thomas J Donaghy (1972): Liverpool & Manchester Railway Operations 1831-1845. David & Charles, Newton Abbot: p111 ↩︎
2. Philip Bagwell (1968): The Railway Clearing House in the British Economy 1842-1922. George Allen & Unwin, London: pp48-49 ↩︎
3. House of Commons Transport Committee (2006): How fair are the fares? Train fares and ticketing. https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200506/cmselect/cmtran/700/700i.pdf ↩︎
4. Sqills (2025): Introducing S3 Revenue Management 2.0. https://www.sqills.com/knowledge-hub/introducing-s3-revenue-management-2-0 ↩︎
5. LNER (2026): Simpler Fares Fact Sheet (updated April 2026). https://assets.ctfassets.net/mxack5k9p2sw/wGlcTdUAo2DJJmwqMwn2H/2508c842bf1de698f8620605962dc498/Simpler_Fares_LNER_Fact_Sheet_April_2026.pdf ↩︎
6. Trainline.com Limited (2026): App store description for Trainline iOS app. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/trainline-cheap-train-tickets/id334235181 ↩︎
7. Trainline.com Limited (2026): Trainline Flex product information. https://www.thetrainline.com/trains/great-britain/ticket-types/trainline-flex ↩︎
8. Office of Rail and Road (2024): Rail regulator’s review leads to 50% reduction in maximum fees for ticket refunds. https://www.orr.gov.uk/search-news/rail-regulators-review-leads-50-reduction-maximum-fees-ticket-refunds ↩︎
9. Rail Delivery Group (2026): Ticket Refund Changes – Media Factsheet. https://media.raildeliverygroup.com/news/ticket-refund-changes-media-factsheet ↩︎