A London-based football fan opted to take two flights, two trains and a tram to see a match in Barrow, Cumbria, in order to pay £33 rather than £389 for direct trains.
He told social media followers he had taken the circuitous route partly to draw attention to how “utterly absurd” UK rail fares can be.
Jack Peat, from Crystal Palace, researched Anytime trains from London to Barrow on Tuesday (13 September) but was shocked by the “extortionate” fare of nearly £400.
Looking into alternatives, Mr Peat worked out that he could fly with Ryanair from Gatwick Airport to Dublin, then Dublin to Manchester, for just £17.80, getting trains and trams either side of the flights.
“I really wanted to watch @drfc_official in Barrow tonight, but there’s no way I was paying up to £389 to get there on the train. So I’ve planned an alternative route to highlight three things,” he wrote on Twitter.
“1. My love for #DRFC (obv). 2. My eagerness to try the best pies in Britain. 3. How utterly absurd UK rail fares are.”
Documenting the journey on Twitter, he took an early tram from Beckenham Road, near Crystal Palace, to East Croydon, costing £2.50, then a train from East Croydon to Gatwick for £5.90.
Here, his £10 flight to Dublin awaited, which was followed by a £7.80 Dublin-Manchester flight.
Once in Manchester, Mr Peat spent £6.50 on a local train from Manchester Airport to Barrow-in-Furness, Cumbria. (Research by The Independent found that direct trains from Manchester Airport to Barrow usually cost more like £16 one way.)
The final tally for his five-leg journey, taking 11 hours, was £33; and he even managed to enjoy a pint of Dublin Guinness while waiting in the Irish capital’s airport.
Mr Peat did splurge on a train home to London, finding a fare of just £64.20.
Anytime train fares are the most expensive category due to passengers’ ability to use them on any train service, at peak and off-peak times.
Advance fees, attached to a certain departure time, work out cheaper - at the time of writing an Advance single ticket from London Euston to Barrow-in-Furness, with one change, costs from £34 when booked a month ahead; rising to £51.70 when booked two weeks ahead of travel.
Nevertheless, Mr Peat’s elaborate route via Dublin cost at least £1 less, though he will have generated more carbon in the process.
According to Atmosfair’s carbon-offset calculator, Mr Peat would have generated around 685kg CO2 by taking the two flights, rather than the 15.79kg CO2 produced by a typical London to Barrow train journey.
Writing about the UK’s costly train fares for The Independent earlier this month, travel editor Helen Coffey said: “This is the very point in the climate crisis at which we need to be encouraging more people to swap cars and planes for public transport, and there is less than zero incentive to do so.”
This month, Spain’s prime minister made several categories of rail journey free to commuters for a period of four months, citing the cost of living crisis as a reason for doing so.
Earlier in summer, Germany introduced a €9 ticket for a whole month’s unlimited train travel to incentivise locals and tourists to use the rail network.
