Costly errors in rail advice

Rail passengers are being overcharged in huge numbers because of wrong ticket advice by train operators, a new survey has found.

Two thirds of all rail enquiries resulted in inaccurate information about routes, fares and tickets, research by the Consumers' Association revealed. Travellers were commonly only given one option - the quickest and most expensive. On 47 occasions where researchers were given a fare price, 31 were wrong. The average overcharge on each of these fares was £32.

But Nick Illsley - National Rail Enquiry Service chief executive and director of the Association of Train Operating Companies - dismissed the report as too small to be representative. He said: "To carry out a tiny sample and then claim that two out of three responses are inaccurate is statistically meaningless.

"Clearly they had their own agenda."

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