How to grow off-peak leisure travel by rail

Non-commuter lines are experiencing an upswing in fortunes, but the UK lags behind mainland Europe when it comes to value for money and accessibility. Richard Foster explains what more must be done to fulfil its potential.

In this article:

• Leisure travel is growing as commuting declines, and it has further potential
• The magic of Harry Potter, steam trains and Glenfinnan sightseeing
• The importance of off-peak ticketing, prices and passes
• The many ways in which scenic Europe leads the way
• The Settle-Carlisle line and National Park opportunities

There are two Clapham Junctions. The first is on the South Western Main Line from Waterloo, with lines heading out to London Victoria, Reading, Brighton, the South West, and the south-east London suburbs. Oh, and there’s a connection to the London Overground network, too.

According to railwaydata.co.uk, 20,709,150 people passed through this Clapham Junction’s gates in 2022-23. This made it Britain’s 16th most-used station, while its 14,214 scheduled services per week made it Britain’s busiest.

Around 270 miles north was the other Clapham Junction, and the contrast couldn’t have been greater. We use the past tense because there hasn’t been a junction here since 1967, when the line north to Ingleton was lifted.

A few yards south of where the junction used to be is the station, called plain old Clapham.

Almost lost in the vastness of the Yorkshire Dales, and some distance away from the village it serves, it boasted 9,140 entrances and exits in the same 2022-23 period, making it Britain’s 2,342nd busiest station - out of 2,575.

The station sits on the former ‘Little North Western’ route from Skipton to Carnforth and has just 106 scheduled services per week.

So, why draw attention to these two contrasting locations?

Leisure versus commuting demand

It’s commuter traffic that makes Clapham Junction so busy. But in the latest figures recently published by the Office of Rail and Road, season tickets - the hallmark of commuting - accounted for just 13% of rail journeys made between April 2023 and March 2024. That’s down from 15% in the previous reporting period.

But passenger journeys are on the increase. There were 1.61 million passenger journeys made between April 2023 and March 2024. That’s 16% up on April 2022-March 2023 (1.38 million) and very close to the 1.74 million record of April 2019-March 2020.

This clearly shows that an increase in home working is having an impact on rail travel, so where has that growth come from?

The Railway Industry Association reported that an increase in leisure travel during April-July 2023 boosted rail revenues by £295 million. Leisure travel during that period accounted for £1.43 billion of rail passenger revenue. By contrast, commuting accounted for ‘just’ £929 million.

Clapham village is beautiful. Made of distinctive North Yorkshire stone, its buildings are surrounded by miles of drystone wall - the hallmark of rural northern England.

There are miles of unbroken views in all directions, good walking aplenty, picturesque valleys, and delightful rivers.

It's a destination that promises to delight - a perfect tourist and leisure destination. Might Clapham therefore be on course to overtake Clapham Junction in terms of sheer busyness?

Highly unlikely, but it does highlight a serious point.

Leisure lines lag behind

Britain has miles and miles of rural railway. Some of it runs through spectacular scenery, such as the Yorkshire Dales. Other stretches - no less pretty - still play a vital role in connecting tourist destinations.

But what unites many of these rural railways is that they are shadows of their former selves. The only reason that they continue is that the introduction of multiple units and the reduction in trackwork and station facilities reduced overheads to a point where they were allowed to do so.

These lines haven’t really changed in decades. How many bus shelter-type stations have we seen replaced by the grander and more user-friendly stations? Where are all the new, longer trains designed to cater for this growing leisure market?

In the next dale from Clapham is the Settle-Carlisle Line. If this line is any indicator of what’s happening elsewhere on the network, those extra travellers are simply squeezing themselves aboard the tired old Class 15X family of units that have been plugging away on these lines for decades.

“I was on a two-car train from Carlisle and a coach party got on at Appleby. It was a pre-booked coach party, but there were no reserved seats for them. It was packed! And it’s a constant source of embarrassment that the line doesn’t have the capacity to satisfy the demand. At times, two cars is relatively sufficient, but at other times, it is embarrassingly insufficient.”

So says Mark Rand, from the Friends of the Settle-Carlisle Line, offering a personal experience of a situation that’s frustratingly commonplace on the S&C. It’s also a situation that can be found on other popular scenic routes.

Polls from tourism groups can never seem to decide on whether it’s the S&C or the Fort William-Mallaig line that deserves the title of ‘Britain’s Most Scenic Rail Journey’.

The latter has been in the news this year owing to the ongoing saga regarding central door locking on Mk 1 coaches. When West Coast Railways was forced to stop operating, online advice recommended using a timetabled ScotRail service. The scenery, of course, doesn’t change depending on the train you’re riding on.

This is true. But it overlooks one simple fact: riding in a Mk 1 (or even a Mk 2) is a much more pleasant experience than a Class 156. You don’t get that unholy row from the engine as it revs up prior to departure. You don’t feel every rail joint. The seats might be overly springy, but you get plenty of leg room. And the panelled wood interior seems to absorb noise from fellow travellers. The bus-like body of a Class 156 seems to amplify it.

You also get a bay of four seats to a window in a Mk 1 (unless you’re lucky enough to get a compartment), and the windows are big. Regardless of the motive power up front, it’s a much nicer way to travel.

There are some signs that things are changing. When he’s not producing miniature scenery for RAIL’s sister publication Model Rail, Peter Marriott is an avid train traveller, clocking up huge mileages in both Britain and Europe. He’s in a perfect position to judge the merits of rural rail travel both here and abroad.

“We had a holiday in the Lake District recently and I did a trip from Windermere to Keighley,” he says.

“From Windermere to Lancaster, it was a CAF Class 195. It was a really nice train, really good indeed. But then I changed to a ‘158’ at Lancaster. The ‘158’ is OK… it’s a lot nicer than the ‘150’ and the ‘156’.”

The contrast with continental Europe

But how does such a journey compare with somewhere such as Switzerland?

“There are some absolutely amazing Swiss trains that go through the Alps - some with panoramic roofs. The regional trains, most of which are double-deck, are great for looking at the scenery. They all have big windows and they’re very comfortable.

“The only trains that aren’t as comfortable are the local trains, but compared with a ‘156’, they’re still good and probably half the age.”

Former RAIL Deputy Editor Stefanie Foster drew attention to the fact that a fresh approach is needed to the design of train interiors, if the railway wants to capitalise on increases in leisure travel.

In RAIL 942’s Comment, she painted a picture of rolling stock designed specifically for leisure travel: “Ironing board seats and misaligned windows/seats are gone. In their place must come guard’s van-style storage areas and compartments where families can be together without disturbing others.”

Such a train would be a boon for long-distance inter-city travel, but it could transform the rural railway. It would enable families and groups to enjoy the scenery on offer, and travellers would be more inclined to use the railway once again as a way of getting from A to B.

Such trains do exist elsewhere in Europe. Austrian operator ÖBB’s ‘Railjet’ service, which uses Siemens Viaggio Comfort locomotive-hauled coaches, includes compartments dubbed ‘family zones’.

The Czech Republic offers six reversible seats within a children’s compartment. Finland… France… Germany… the list goes on.

Cycling and skiing in Scotland

ScotRail can usually be relied upon for taking a proactive approach. It’s not gone for the children’s ball pit found on some Japanese trains, nor the Viking longship-themed play area coming soon to trains in Norway, but it has decided to make an interior suited for the great outdoors that its rural railways serve.

It had five ex-Great Western Railway Class 153s extensively rebuilt by Brodie Engineering in Kilmarnock. Some 24 seats were retained, but the rest of the interior was converted into space for conveying bicycles, skis and other outdoor equipment.

They’re used on the ‘Highland Explorer’ service. This involves pairing them with ‘156s’ on the West Highland Line between Glasgow, Oban, Fort William and Mallaig.

Using the ‘Highland Explorer’ is as simple as making a cycle reservation.

However, its one downside is the timetable. It runs between Glasgow and Oban five days a week, but only between Glasgow and Mallaig Mondays-Fridays and Mallaig-Glasgow between Tuesdays and Saturdays. This would no doubt make a weekend of cycling around Mallaig difficult.

RAIL doesn’t condone Members of Parliament applying pressure to an independent safety regulator, but you can understand the underlying reasons why eight MPs wrote to the Rail Minister to voice their concerns about the suspension of the ‘Jacobite’ earlier in the year. Delivering two trainloads of passengers to Mallaig every day has had an undeniably positive impact on its local economy.

Steam returned to the West Highland Extension to Mallaig in 1984.

What started as a group trying to use steam to reinvigorate Scotland’s rural railways (evidence of BR Chairman Sir Peter Parker’s “steam warmed the market for railways” phrase) soon got the backing of ScotRail and Mallaig Community Council. With the local economy in the doldrums and ScotRail looking for new opportunities, the first ‘West Highlanders’ ran in May of that year.

Steam sight-seeing at Glenfinnan

How much the Harry Potter effect is responsible for the popularity of the ‘Jacobite’ (the successor to the ‘West Highlanders’) is difficult to quantify, but the impact of visitors to Glenfinnan desperate to photograph steam on what can now truly be called an iconic viaduct has stretched resources and infrastructure in the area to breaking point.

National Trust for Scotland’s Glenfinnan visitor centre welcome 500,000 visitors in 2023 - that’s 46% up on 2022 and 9% up on 2019. National Trust for Scotland is now trying to devise options to get people to Glenfinnan in the most sustainable way possible.

The ‘Jacobite’ originated in the days before ‘open access’, when you could take a steam locomotive anywhere, provided it physically fits.

Before that, BR had a list of routes that were approved for steam, with Fort William-Mallaig being one. The Settle-Carlisle was, naturally, another. Others included York-Scarborough, the Cumbrian Coast, the Welsh Marches, and even Marylebone to Stratford-upon-Avon.

The latter, thanks to the efforts of Chiltern Railways, is now thriving. But the Cumbrian Coast or the Welsh Marches route would no doubt welcome a ‘Jacobite’-esque financial boost.

In 2005, Arriva Trains Wales tried to emulate in North wales what the ‘Jacobite’ has done for the West Highlands.

It hired in ‘4MT’ No. 76079 for a series of ‘Cambrian Coast Express’ trips between Machynlleth, Aberystwyth and Porthmadog, four days a week for four weeks. Steam Railway reported that trains were full (one train of 342 seats reportedly carried 375 passengers).

ScotRail used steam to put the then-new Borders Railway firmly on the map.

‘A4’ No. 60009 Union of South Africa hauled the opening train, conveying Her Majesty the Queen on September 9 2015, and was then used on a series of railtours later that month.

Then Scottish Transport Minister Derek Mackay said: “Steam services running on the reopened Borders Railway really will recapture the golden age of Scottish rail travel.”

And here’s one last piece of evidence, should any more be needed: when the Settle-Carlisle needed a pick-me-up, having been closed for a year because of a landslip, what was the solution?

Running new-build ‘A1’ No. 60163 Tornado on timetabled passenger trains. For three days in mid-February, the S&C carried 5,500 passengers. Normally, the figure for the same period would be around 250.

Running steam is expensive, far from environmentally friendly, and susceptible to aspects such as fire risk. They need specific servicing requirements, too. Surely, it’s better to leave operating steam to the myriad charter operators that often feature a rural railway in their tour programmes.

Alternatively, what about seeking out more opportunities to work in partnership with a preserved railway, such as that between Whitby and Grosmont?

North Yorkshire Moors Railway trains - steam or diesel-hauled - fit in between main line services, while input from the preservationists has restored track and other infrastructure.

Sadly, such opportunities are few and far between. An occasional North Norfolk Railway-operated Sheringham-Cromer service is about the only one that springs to mind.

Peak off-peak prices

Price is always going to be a major consideration when it comes to tempting tourists out of their cars.

Good-value tickets are key to this, and the ‘ranger’ ticket could be the ideal option. Rather than use the car to get around your holiday locale, why not (as per the old slogan) let the train take the strain?

There are a multitude of Rover and Ranger tickets available, and herein lies the problem. Reforming ticket pricing and structuring is a common theme in the pages of RAIL. Navigating the plethora of options is difficult and time-consuming. And they’re expensive.

Let’s stay with the East Anglian example for the moment. Norfolk and Suffolk boast some beautiful stretches of railway to enjoy, alongside tourist attractions aplenty for all ages.

Greater Anglia offers Anglia Plus. You can use it to get to coastal resorts such as Sheringham and Great Yarmouth, the Broads, and bustling cities such as Norwich and Cambridge. It covers local bus routes as well.

Sounds ideal, doesn’t it? Except that it will cost a family of four the best part of £120 for just three days’ travel (apparently, you can get a weekly season ticket, but finding this on the GA website was practically impossible).

Oh, and you’d struggle to have a day out in ‘Sunny Hunny’ (Hunstanton to the rest of the country), because Anglia Plus isn’t valid on the Ely-King’s Lynn line.

By contrast, the average car will be capable of doing seven days of motoring in East Anglia for under £120.

Unsurprisingly, our European neighbours do things differently.

What operators can learn from Europe

Peter Marriott describes Swiss rail operator SBB’s Swiss Travel Pass as the “gold standard… and it’s the gold standard for everywhere in Europe”.

Its nearest UK equivalent is the All-Line Rover (ALR). A seven-day standard ALR for one adult costs £598, and there are all sorts of restrictions.

You can’t use LNER, Avanti West Coast, East Midlands Railway or CrossCountry services. You can’t use certain stations, including Birmingham New Street and three London termini. And it isn’t valid on metro or light rail services.

By contrast, the Swiss Travel Pass, according to SBB, offers “unlimited travel by train, bus and boat”.

That includes ‘Premium Panorama’ trains (although some surcharges may apply), some of its most spectacular mountain railways, unlimited public transport in “90 towns and cities”, 50% discounts on other mountain excursions, and free admission to “more than 500 museums”. An eight-day pass (for one adult) will set you back £366.

And that’s not all.

“There are also Regional Passes,” Marriott explains.

“A Geneva Pass will include part of Lake Geneva and then part of the land behind the lake. [Within that area] it includes all the trains, all the boats and the buses.

“But also in Switzerland, they offer ‘Guest Passes’ - and the ultimate ‘Guest Pass’ is in the Ticino area, where Switzerland borders Italy. This pass is amazing.

“As long as you stay in a hotel, a B&B or even in a campsite or a hostel, they’ll give you this ticket for every day that you’re there. And it’s free.

“It covers the trains, the buses, and also includes a few of the boats. But it also includes discounts on all its attractions - and there are even a few free ones.”

Similar passes exist throughout Europe - particularly in Germany, where what’s known as a ‘bed tax’ (Bettensteuern) has been in place since 2005.

Effectively, a percentage of the cost of an overnight stay is collected as tax (in some cities, the tax is a fixed amount - in Hamburg, it’s €3). However, guests receive perks such as free local travel in return.

Marriott also highlights Austria as another country leading the way in developing tickets for tourists.

Rail operator ÖBB offers the Einfach-Raus-Ticket. This allows groups between two and five people to travel anywhere on the local and regional railway network for as little as £30.

“There are also regional tickets where you can ride for seven days for £20 per person,” he says.

“It’s the regional tickets that have the real appeal because it gives people the freedom, where they don’t have to keep on buying tickets and checking in and checking out.”

Newquay Business Improvement District recorded that the total number of visitors to the Cornish resort for the whole of 2021 was 5,958,759.

It didn’t give a breakdown of how many of those visitors arrived by train, but for those who do, the facilities at Newquay station are sparse to say the least: no ticket office, no staff, no toilets, and no waiting room. There isn’t even a ticket machine.

Luckily, being in the centre of town, there are refreshments available nearby.

It’s the same story on every Cornish branch line, at Looe and Falmouth Town. St Ives does at least have a ticket office, but it’s only open on weekdays during the summer.

How does a Swiss branch line terminus compare?

Different, says Marriot. “It’ll have at least two or three vending machines. It’ll have a shelter. It’ll have an electronic timetable. And it might have a bus stop and the bus is there ready.”

Now we touch on a key subject that could have huge benefits for attracting passengers to our rural railway network.

Swiss timing and Settle-Carlisle

“I suppose the one key that Switzerland has, really more than any other country, is the timing of the trains,” says Marriott.

“You’ll come into a station and if you want to change trains onto a branch line, that train is generally there within eight or nine minutes. If you’re changing to a bus, it’ll be there on the forecourt. Their integration is brilliant.

“The integration of going from Windermere to Keighley isn’t the best. For example, you’re stuck on Lancaster station for at least 20 minutes.”

But integration is something that the Friends of the Settle-Carlisle Line is working to address.

“We’re working with local bus companies, such as Dale Buses, to persuade them to put on buses that can take people jumping off the train to villages like Hawes,” says FoSCL Communications and Media Director Mark Chung.

“There are some new services as well, which take people from Ribblehead over to Richmond in North Yorkshire.”

Many rural railways benefit from Community Rail Partnerships or ‘Friends’ campaigning groups, but the S&C is arguably a leader in the field. It has three organisations working for its benefit.

The Settle and Carlisle Railway Trust is a charity that primarily works to preserve the line’s historic stations and structures.

The Settle-Carlisle Development Company is a not-for-profit limited company that works “in partnership with the rail industry, local businesses, community groups and organisations to encourage socio-economic engagement along the world-renowned Leeds-Settle-Carlisle railway”.

And the Friends, which was formed in 1981, originally as a campaigning group, has now morphed into a support organisation whose initiatives fill in the gaps - sort of.

It was the threat of closure - and its subsequent reprieve - in the 1980s that has given the S&C an unprecedented number of support organisations. But it has meant that pretty much every initiative or marketing method that can be used to promote a railway has been used here.

Redundant station buildings have been turned into holiday lets which book up well in advance, while a volunteer-run cafe at Ribblehead has now been joined by a cafe/bar at Horton-in-Ribblesdale, which opens at weekends.

“The original cafe in Horton closed some years ago, so people doing the Three Peaks basically had nowhere to go and nothing to do,” says Chung.

“Now the cafe-bar is open on the station platform, at least they can get some refreshments when they’ve finished the walk.”

The trust not only provides a trolley service on S&C services, but it’s a trolley that offers local ice cream. Is that unique on a British railway?

Freezers at Appleby and Settle enable the trolley to be restocked with these tasty treats.

Meanwhile, FoSCL volunteers offer on-train commentary, while others host guided walks (both circular or between stations) throughout the year.

“They’re called Walk the Line,” explains Chung.

“We also run a series of historic walks called Footsteps in Time. They focus on areas like Ribblehead, taking in the shanty town and over into the church to see some of the graves.”

Such initiatives are seen to not only attract people to enjoy the history of this line, but to use its stations. And FoSCL’s two Marks - Chung and Rand - are pleased to see Northern making some timetable tweaks to help deliver passengers to its more rural stations.

“It’s only in the last year or so that all Northern trains have actually stopped at Ribblehead,” says Rand.

“We had a train famine every afternoon, punctuated halfway through by a train that whisked straight through. But now, that train has been persuaded to stop.”

Chung adds: “We’re also starting to work more closely with entities such as the Yorkshire Dales National Park and places that are nearby, but not directly along the line.

National Park promotion

“For example, in Hawes, you have the museum there. You have Wensleydale cheese. What we’d like to do is to promote the places, because it’s not just about the train, the journey, it’s also about places along the line, the villages and towns where people can visit as well.”

That view echoes comments made by Colin Speakman, walker, transport campaigner and chairman of the Dales Way Association.

Speaking in 2014, Speakman said: “The service was planned not just for walkers - it was equally important for local people. So, the Saturday service had a mid-morning trip back into Leeds to give local people shopping time in Leeds.

“The second weekend in June [1975] was much busier... it was like Circle Line in the rush hour.”

Speakman was talking about the relationship between the S&C and the Yorkshire Dales National Park, which dates back to the 1970s.

Dales Rail was whereby the National Park effectively took on responsibility for maintaining stations, obtaining grant money and chartered trains from BR. Dales Rail, which made a small profit for the National Park, continued into the 1980s, when it was taken over by West Yorkshire Metro.

Is there scope for getting national parks more involved in rail operations? Could, for example, an Eryri (Snowdonia) National Park-backed Dales Rail-type operation work between Llandudno and Blaenau Ffestiniog - or along the Cambrian Coast?

A welcome return to the S&C is Northern’s ‘Yorkshire Dales Explorer’, a service that connects the people of Rochdale and Manchester with Ribblehead, where it terminates.

“We see ourselves as independent champions of the line and our goal is to increase the passenger numbers, however we can do it,” says Chung. And a service that now taps into the Greater Manchester area goes someway to achieving that aim.

But one transformative change would be the reintroduction of passenger services to the freight-only line between Clitheroe and Hellifield. This would potentially open the doors for tourist traffic from Blackburn, Burnley and Preston, too.

This tapping into potential customers in large urban areas is what has led the Friends to incorporate the word ‘Leeds’ into the line’s description.

“We’re now making a focus on ‘Leeds-Settle-Carlisle Line’, because that will bring in people that have never travelled before from Leeds into the Dales,” says Chung.

“We are now working with groups [in Leeds] such as dementia groups, community groups, school groups to give them the information to take them on trips along the line as well.”

Plus, by expanding the reach of the S&C south, Brontë country around Haworth, the Keighley and Worth Valley, and Ilkley Moor can all be added to its list of scenic treasures.

Off-peak is the new priority

It is the decline in the sale of season tickets versus the rise in off-peak tickets that suggest that the future of rail travel is with the leisure and tourist markets.

Ben Craig, at Network Rail Consulting, wrote on NR’s website: “Current trends suggest that future passenger demand growth will be increasingly off-peak. Many railways are seeing a new type of passenger, rather than the traditional five-days-a-week commuter.”

Craig lists many potential benefits, including: “Commuter-based railways are expensive to operate, since many of the trains, full staffing and infrastructure capacity are only required twice each weekday. If passengers can be more evenly spread across the day, the future railway will see better utilisation of fixed assets and resources, enabling growth without adding costs.”

Issues that need to be overcome include a change to forecasting figures, which are usually based on peak growth (‘population’ or ‘economics’, writes Craig), and that “innovation in growth initiatives may be required… it may be necessary to experiment and accept initial risk”.

However, he concludes that a railway focused on off-peak growth can not only benefit from modal shift away from cars, but also from “a more diverse group of passengers rather than being dominated by commuters into city centres”.

It can become “a railway which aides economic growth in areas including tourism”.

The threat of closure has hung over our rural railways like the sword of Damocles, but if the stats are correct, their future looks brighter now than arguably at any time before.

But it requires some serious investment and radical thinking to get the best from them.

New rolling stock, improved station facilities, improved connections and all-encompassing tickets without restrictions would surely encourage holidaymakers to leave the car at home, and thus cement these railways as key parts of the local economy.

The full pictorial version of this article with more images first appeared in RAIL 1016. Subscribe today and never miss an issue of RAIL. With a Print + Digital subscription, you’ll get each issue delivered to your door for FREE (UK only). Plus, enjoy an exclusive monthly e-newsletter from the Editor, rewards, discounts and prizes, AND full access to the latest and previous issues via the app.