Rail season tickets take up a grotesque amount of your net pay

There are certain purchases that seem to make you feel far more guilty than others; those that seem to hit your wallet the hardest and make themselves felt. A new pair of shoes, meals out, streaming subscriptions. Then there are those you have to begrudgingly resign yourself to as facts of life – and barely register them as a result. When you comb over your bank statements at the end of the month, these are the ones you skip over because they are just the cost of living. You need to pay rent or your mortgage to have somewhere to live, you need to buy food to not starve and you need to pay for travel to get places.

If you happen to have the misfortune of having to catch trains to go anywhere, you’ll know the experience is one that you’d rather avoid anyway, let alone have to pay for, let alone have to pay 10 per cent of your disposable income on...

An investigation by the BBC has found commuters will pay an average of £2,446 for their annual season ticket for the privilege of being crushed into overheated metal tubes and shunted from place to place.

The data unit found that commuters can pay up to 40p per mile of railway travelled.

Given trains on average travel at 60-65mph, you could be spending £4 for every ten minutes of your commute endured – barely enough time to listen to a podcast – if yours is one of the journeys below.

There are a few lines that are relatively decent value though; if you’re travelling from Worcester to Birmingham on the reg, you can recline in your seat safe in the knowledge yours is the best value journey in the country. We advise spending entire days going back and forth, sending pics of yourself smugly enjoying the Midlands countryside to any unfortunate souls you know trying to get into London.

More good news for commuters comes in the shape of the expected 1.9 per cent rise in the cost of rail tickets, which will arrive in January. Hooray! 

Check out the full data from the BBC's investigation here

(Image: Getty)