'You're not banging on about train tickets again are you'.
These were the words of my long-suffering wife as she heard me launching into an impassioned rant to some visiting friends this weekend about the limitations and frustrations of Merseyrail's ticketing system. She has put up with a lot of this chat to be fair, I'm not sure she imagined this was what marriage would be like.
If there is indeed a correlation between entering your early (to mid) thirties and caring passionately about public transport issues, then I am a classic of the genre. The truth is I have always found the Merseyrail network generally reliable, useful and even - dare I say it - enjoyable to travel on, but that network - and the people who use it - are being badly let down by a painfully outdated and impractical ticketing system.
