and I’ll charge you for the bullet

Oh, okay, I might just rant a little bit.

It’s not just the unashamed greed on display here that is fucking unbelievable, it’s that they truly expect anyone outside of their little cigar-smoking top-hat circle to accept their “There Is No Alternative” bullshit. (Mind you, it’s worked so many times in the past, they could be right.)

Rail passengers could face congestion charge-style price hikes at rush hour to combat rising passenger numbers.

The Association of Train Operating Companies (Atoc) proposed “rail peak pricing” to combat a forecast rise in travellers of at least 28% in 10 years.

Atoc said the government’s road charging plan could prompt such a move by forcing more people on to trains…

…An Atoc future strategy document published on Monday said: “Any rail service which is a practicable alternative for people using the car on a high-charge road journey will need its own peak pricing system.”

This is an amazing way of trying to make “it’s going to be more expensive to use cars in rush hour soon, so we’ll be able to get away with charging more for the train” sound like an unavoidable necessity rather than yet another example of the over-funded incompetent bastards not only running off with the family silver but now coming back and charging us fifty quid to use a spoon. Per mouthful.

Atoc Director General George Muir told BBC Radio 4′s Today programme: “In the next 10 years the objective will be to run as many trains as we sensibly can, and as long trains as we can, to carry the maximum capacity.

Like fuck. The objective is to make as much money as possible. You and the people you represent have no interest in providing a service. This is such an obvious point. How can you possibly say the above on live radio without the entire rest of the studio laughing? Do you have a mute for them?

“But there will come a point, and we are not far from that point, where we have reached capacity, and at that particular time if road use pricing then comes in it clearly has a knock-on effect on the pricing of other modes.”

No, it doesn’t “have a knock-on effect”. There is nothing pre-ordained or required about it, however much you try to express it in such terms. What it means that you think you’ll be able to raise your already ridiculously inflated prices even more, even after over six billion pounds of public subsidy to your “private industry”, without even having to improve service.

Oh, and you can fuck off with this as well:

The strategy document – entitled Looking Forward: Contribution to Railway Strategy – also said scrapping under-used trains and stations could help operators handle growth.

Franchise requirements forcing operators to continue running these should be ditched, it said.

It was clear from day one that handing over the maintenance of a public service infrastructure to this collection of gangsters was a bad idea, but now they’re just laughing in our faces. First against the wall, Muir. You and your friends will be first against the wall. Don’t worry, there’s room, it’s a long wall.