You may notice the fine cut of the suit opposite. Or the elegant pearls gracing the lady in the corner. You detect strains of Mozart from your neighbour's headphones. And isn't that a chairman's statement being tapped into the laptop? Welcome to tomorrow's railway. An exclusive railway. No need for first class any more: hoi polloi no longer travel by train. If you look out of the window, you'll see them packed into motorway coaches. You may even glimpse a lonely anorak, looking wistfully at the trains he cannot now afford. How quiet it is without his prosaic chatter. What a blessing it was to cut out all those off-peak saver tickets!

The mandarins are delighted: a real free market, at last. Train companies can raise fares as high as they want. No problem paying back a billion a year to the Treasury by those who rashly bid too high for a franchise. No problem finding a seat. No need for more trains or new lines or billions extra to cope with millions of extra passengers. And no more long queues at ticket offices: "Return to Manchester, sir? Certainly. £202 please."

Siren voices have been cajoling the Department for Transport. Why should rail companies worry about off-peak travel? No hour is now off-peak in a 24/7 society - even the midnight trains are packed. All the rules and conditions of saver tickets confuse passengers. Time of departure? Time of return? Route? Train company? It would be far easier, the rail insiders argued, to remove the caps on savers and let the market set the fares. Look at the old days - steam trains, draughty booking offices and clunky cardboard tickets. Nostalgics pay a fortune for this on private lines: why not extend the network?