Fury at railway C-charge

London commuters today expressed anger and dismay at the prospect of paying a "congestion charge" to use rush-hour trains.

The scheme is seen as "inevitable" by train companies because of overcrowding on the South-East's increasingly strained services, it emerged today.

The recommended charges would apply to the most congested services, including "almost all routes in and out of Waterloo, Victoria, Liverpool Street and London Bridge during the rush hour".

They would add several hundred pounds to the price of a season ticket at a time when other commuting costs such as petrol, the road congestion charge and Tube tickets are all rising by more than the rate of inflation. Despite

record amounts of money being spent on the railways on some London commuter routes, one in four trains still runs late. Routes serving London are the busiest in the country but the tracks are so full there is no room to run extra trains.

The previously discredited idea of using fare increases to control the number of people using the busiest routes was introduced by the old British Rail in the early Eighties.

Now the plan has been floated by the Association of Train Operating Companies (Atoc) in a new report. It forecasts that the number of people using the trains will increase by 28 per cent in the next decade.

Passengers told the Evening Standard that the proposed rail charge was yet another burden that many could not afford.

Emily Sparks, 24, a business development manager from Fulham, said: "I think this is outrageous given the amount of money the Government is supposed to be pumping into rail services. They do not want you to use your cars. They seem to think it is reasonable to charge more for the only realistic alternative commuters are left with. It just does not add up."

Louise Whitaker, a 34-year-old human resources manager from Burnham in Berkshire, said: "I have absolutely no choice but to

use the train if I want to keep my job. The car is not an option. I wouldn't mind if the service was any good but over the years the train journeys have got longer, started stopping at more stations and leaving at less convenient times which is a bit of an insult really."

Student Carrie McAlinden, 17, from Sidcup, said: "I really don't have much money and if they put up the fares it will just exclude me from the railways at certain times of the day. That is just unfair.

"Some of the people commuting into London are amongst the poorest paid and have to live outside London, because they don't have enough to live inside. To raise fares for those people is just hitting the poorest people."

Chris Nicholas, a 26-year-old civil servant from Cambridge, said: "A fare rise for peak services is only acceptable as a short-term solution as it does not really solve anything."

Retail portfolio manager Rob Callaghan, 49, from Leighton Buzzard, said: "It is ridiculous. A rail fare increase would have virtually no impact on overcrowding as people don't have any choice but to commute in by train." But George Muir, director general of Atoc, said there was no way of avoiding rail peak pricing if train use continued to increase. If national road pricing came into force it would "tend to push" more people on to the trains, making extra charges "inevitable", he said.

However, Transport Secretary Alistair Darling rejected the suggestion. "We do need more capacity and pricing people off the railway isn't the answer." But he added: "There are solutions that need to be examined."

He said that last year more than one billion passenger journeys were made across the national rail network - the highest figure since the early 1960s. Use of rail in the UK "is growing faster than anywhere else in Europe".

In 2004 there were an average of more than 2.7 million passengers every day and 65 per cent of all rail journeys start or finish in London.