Passengers on the busiest train routes might have to pay a congestion charge, under new proposals aimed at tackling the problem of overcrowding on trains.

According to a paper published by the Association of Train Operating Companies (ATOC), passenger growth on trains is forecast to increase by at least 28% over the next 10 years. The ATOC said that, as a result, some routes would become “very crowded”.

The solution, proposed in the ATOC’s ‘Looking Forward: Contribution to Railway Strategy’ would involve ‘rail peak pricing’, which would charge passengers for travelling on the busiest services.

The plans, which would involve the use of electronic smart cards to allow railways to charge differing prices, could prove to be controversial. The Rail Passengers Council argued that travelling on trains during less busy periods should be made “more attractive” to passengers to encourage them to use trains more, rather than charging people travelling at peak times, who may have no other choice other than to travel by train.

The ATOC also suggested a number of other methods to tackle increasing passenger growth, which included: selective lengthening of trains; improving track layouts; identifying ‘pinch points’ on the network and taking measures to address them and removing franchise requirements to run under-used trains or preserve very under-used stations, which absorb capacity.

ATOC Director General George Muir said: “While the immediate priority for rail is cost reduction and further improvement to punctuality, the high levels of growth in passenger and freight traffic means there is an urgent need to plan and implement solutions that meet future demand in ways that are financially viable.”

However, Bob Crow, General Secretary for the RMT union, said that plans to scrap under-used trains and stations were “another classic bit of upside-down logic from a bunch of privateers whose main function is to remove large sums of taxpayers’ and passengers’ cash from the railway industry”.

He said: “Talk about cutting costs is a bit rich from the private sector, which enjoys more than three times the subsidy that British Rail got, while the cost of private-sector rail investment is now three times more expensive than it was in British Rail days.”

Mr Crow added: “The biggest drain on the railway industry is the private sector itself, which has sucked out more than £6 billion since privatisation and the best way to cut costs is to bring rail operations back into public ownership.”

(KMcA/SP)