The Gatwick Express takes people to and from the UK’s second-busiest airport, doesn’t it? Surely if a passenger express gets stuck behind a broken-down freight train for over half an hour, it will be late?

And why would a ticket from A to C ever cost more than the sum of A to B and B to C? These are some of the many mysteries of the world’s maddest railway.

The Gatwick Express that doesn’t stop at Gatwick

For four decades the Gatwick Express has been connecting London Victoria with the UK’s second-busiest airport – commanding a premium for doing so. But last month I travelled on the 6.03pm from London Bridge to Bognor Regis. It was Gatwick Express rolling stock, and the route took it through the airport’s station. So I assumed (as possibly did other passengers) that it would stop at Gatwick. Instead, it passed through Gatwick at 80mph.

What’s happening? Well, the Gatwick Express may have plenty of bright-red rolling stock, but the level of demand for premium rail between London and the Sussex airport has not yet bounced back since the Covid pandemic (or, equally likely, more passengers realise paying £4.80 extra to save two minutes on the journey isn’t a briliant deal). So the heavily branded trains are used on other routes in the giant Govia Thameslink Railway (GTR) franchise, which also includes Southern and Thameslink.

A GTR spokesperson explained the reason for the 6.03pm (non-) Gatwick Express: “This train is a commuter ‘crowdbuster’ that will be replaced this May with a green Southern-branded train. We could have waited for the Southern train to become available but wanted to give our customers the benefit of an additional service as soon as possible, and the Gatwick Express-branded train was available.

“We appreciate it may look unusual but passenger information systems at our stations, on board and online, make it clear this train does not call at Gatwick Airport, where we have frequent services of up to 16 trains per hour in each direction.”

Why is there a ‘Didcot dodge’?

Any regular passenger who books on the day to travel between London and Bristol knows that it would be mad to buy a ticket from London Paddington to Bristol Temple Meads. Instead, buy one ticket from Paddington to Didcot Parkway and another from there.

The “Didcot dodge” as it is popularly known is one of thousands of examples of “split tickets” that legally exploit anomalies in the fares system. You will save over £50 on the cost of a peak journey between London and Bristol Temple Meads.

The caveat is that you must ensure that you are on one of the many trains that stop at Didcot rather than racing through non-stop between Reading and Swindon; no need to get off at the leafy Oxfordshire station.

The Didcot dodge exists because of a disconnect between fare policies. Didcot is part of the old Network SouthEast organisation where fares were kept relatively low (yes, I know it doesn’t feel like it ) in order to make commuting, leisure trips or business trips more affordable.

The intercity link between London and Bristol has been using high-speed trains for almost half a century and is treated as a premium service with fares to match. The segment between Didcot and Bristol is regarded as a regional service on which fares are typically much lower than on trains serving London. All of which means you can save plenty of cash making it a journey of two halves.

Why are more Northern Trains cancelled to the west of the Pennines on Sundays than to the east?

Perhaps rail privatisation wasn’t perhaps a brilliant idea after all: it has certainly pushed up the cost of running the railway. Individual train operators negotiated with the rail unions, who performed brilliantly in dividing and ruling as they exploited decades-old working agreements.

The whole system became fragmented, with some companies persuading the unions – with the application of extra pay – to include Sunday in the working week. At others, it remains optional.

With the constantly changing franchises, Northern is an amalgam of several previous operators – one of which, covering northwest England has never had Sundays in the working week for guards. If they don’t feel like working on a Sunday there’s no obligation at all for them to do so and why should they?

It is inconvenient for passengers, though.

Successive governments keep saying they’re going to do something about it. But solving the problem by putting Sunday inside the working week for everyone would come at the price of higher wages, increasing the extraordinarily high losses on the railway – currently £400 per second – still further.

How can an Avanti West Coast express be delayed by more than 30 minutes but then arrive early?

Last week I spent half an hour at a standstill somewhere south of Weedon in Northamptonshire on an Edinburgh-London Euston train. The train manager explained a broken-down freight train was blocking the line.

The Avanti West Coast driver walked from one end to the other, because at one point the train was going back to Rugby, and then back again. But the freight train recovered its power and started to move south. It would have continued to slow our progress, but Network Rail diverted it on to a loop so the express could overtake. Despite losing 30 minutes, the train actually arrived early at Euston.

Avanti West Coast had padded the schedule more than I have seen before. A spokesperson told me: “To accommodate planned maintenance by Network Rail on our route and provide a better experience to our customers, some of our services have longer scheduled journey times than what is shown elsewhere in the timetable.

“This is called ‘pathing time’ and is an industry process to allow for delays because of planned work.”