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I am just old enough to remember a time when you could call British Rail and ask for train times and ticket prices. They would tell you the most cost effective and time effective route for your journey. They would also, invariably, explain how to get a cheaper ticket by booking earlier, or at a different time of day.

Nowadays, working out the rail system in this country is like taking part in an episode of The Krypton Factor and For Boyard all at the same time.

Thanks to our extremely intelligent politicians, we now have lots of separate, private railway companies, who all have separate websites with their own timetables. You can go to www.nationalrail.co.uk and look up train times for the whole network, but you can't buy tickets on that website. However, if you go to the relevant website for the network you want to travel on, you find half the trains featured in National Rail timetables are missing.

Sometimes, you may find an inbound and outbound journey on National Rail actually spans two companies, so you can't book a return ticket in, say, Virgin's website because they only cover half the journey in their timetable.

I was staying in Redhill, which is currently a meeting point for three lines, and I needed to get back to Folkestone. At the ticket office, the lady said, "That will be £85," (I can't actually remember the amount but it was ridiculously high).

After telling her I wanted to buy a ticket and not an actual train, she said, "That's how much it costs because it goes via London."

"I don't need to go via London. Why can't I go via Tonbridge like every other sane person?"

She checked that route and, sure enough, it was less than £20.

Still, it doesn't really matter any more because privatised rail travel is now so expensive, and there are so few carriages in a decreasing number of trains, that I will soon be doing all my travelling by air. After all, the Government is clearly not committed to keeping us on the ground so I may as well go with the flow.