One for the train nerds...

[mcshroom]

Do remember that if your train arrives more than 10 minutes late at the destination you are entitled to a full refund of the ticket.

 

[jonesy]

So how did you get on? Did you have the good fortune to be checked by a guard open to ontological questions?

 

[Linford]

More to the point, arrive in time to miss the train and that is the ticket seller's fault?*

*I type this knowing in my heart that somehow it will be

For selling a ticket which cannot be used that night....I'd say......

 

[jonesy]

Do remember that if your train arrives more than 10 minutes late at the destination you are entitled to a full refund of the ticket.

Alas not. That is only a performance measure for the TOCs. From National Conditions of Carriage:

http://www.nationalrail.co.uk/static/documents/content/NRCOC.pdf

Where delays, cancellations or poor service arise for reasons within the control of
a Train Company or Rail Service Company, you are entitled to compensation in
accordance with the arrangements set out in that Train Company’s Passenger’s
Charter. This can be obtained from the relevant Train Company’s ticket offices,
customer relations office and internet sales site.
(b) The amount of compensation offered by each Train Company in its Passenger’s
Charter varies from Train Company to Train Company. However, if you arrive more
than 60 minutes late at your destination station you will, as a minimum,
be entitled to compensation in the form of travel vouchers in accordance with the
table below:

Ticket held Amount in vouchers
Single ticket 20% of the price paid
Return ticket with delay on outward or return
journey 10% of the price paid
Return ticket with delay on both the outward
and return journey
20% of the price paid
7-Day Season Ticket for each day a delay occurs 20% of the price paid ÷ 7
Monthly or longer period Season Ticket The discount or compensation arrangements in the
relevant Train Company’s Passenger’s Charter apply

 

[srw]

Incidentally, a poster at Wolverhampton station proclaimed that cable theft cost the taxpayer £43 million last year. Discuss.

Point us at the thread (s)he posted in and we will.

I thought the thread title referred to someone other than @Adrian.

 

[vernon]

This summer I arrived at Kings Cross Station with my cycling partner with a fistful of tickets, bike reservations, seat reservations, and meal vouchers only to find that one key piece of cardboard was missing - an actual ticket for the journey. As everything else was in duplicate we decided to try to bluff it out should a ticket inspector turn up.

A ticket inspector did turn up and I dutifully handed over the wad of tickets and let her leaf through them hoping that we'd get away with it. We did. She asked for the missing ticket and we made a great show of searng all of our pockets and handlebar bags and under the seats and table for the missing ticket. She smiled and gently told us that although one of us could be charged the full single fare to Leeds, she was going to let us complete our journey without penalty and that we ought to take more care with tickets in the future.

Our paths crossed again on the platform at Leeds station as we wheeled our bikes towards the ticket barriers which are opened for cyclists without ticket inspection. She gave me a big friendly smile.

I almost proposed marriage.

 

[theclaud]

Advance train reservations can sometimes work in your favour.

On the first night/day of LonJog last year, due to the ride running later than scheduled, I could tell we couldn't get to Bingham in time to then get the train to Nottingham, for our scheduled train back south. So I worked out a cunning plan. Rebecca & I bailed after the lunch stop, cycled to Melton Mowbray, got a train to Leicester, and after a 10 minute wait, then intercepted the scheduled train from Nottingham and hopped on. Being an East Midlands Voyager 222 type train with only 2 bike spaces, as someone already had their bike in there, the guard was originally not going to let us both on, until I proudly flashed our seat & more importantly 2 bike reservations for that actual train, and he shoved the other chap off.

I did feel a teeny bit guilty, although he didn't seem bothered.

Yebbut that's the reservation working in your favour, not the ticket type. You can make a reservation with any ticket type.There is no advantage to Advance tickets, except that they are cheaper, but nowhere near as cheap in practice as they are in the rhetoric of those selling them.

 

[theclaud]

Just get on the train that's most convenient to you and bugger their rules... you bought a specific ticket for a specific train on the grounds it would get you to a specific place by a specific time... flat refuse to pay again if they insist you should because you bought the ticket in good faith that the train would run on time. Don't let 'the man' win.

You missed the hypothetical bit. But your point is a good one - there's an implicit promise in the transaction.

 

[Aperitif]

Good morning. I presume you're off the rails again, Claudine? Happy Christmas shopping!

 

[byegad]

I'd get on the earlier train, which is later than my booked ticket then claim ignorance that this was not in fact 'my train'.

 

[swansonj]

Your ontological question is, I think, another and hitherto under-explored manifestation of debates about fundamental interpretations of quantum mechanics: do entities have intrinsic properties, or do their properties come into being only when observed? If the former, the 2008 is intrinsically the 2008 whether it departs at 2008 or any other time. If the latter, it is a variant of Schrödinger's cat. The cat (sorry, I mean the train) is sitting there in an indeterminate state, strictly speaking a superposition of the wave functions of being the 2008 and being every other possible time. Only when we open the box (sorry again, I mean when the train actually departs) and observe it does the wave function collapse and the cat adopts a state of either being a dead 2008 train or a live 20-0-something-else train. In fact, I think we can usefully ponder whether the train obeys Bose-Einstein statistics, whereby all trains descend into a ground state where they are all indistinguishably identical until one of them is arbitrarily plucked out to form the 2008, or Fermi-Dirac statistics, where the exclusion principle ensures that all trains have unique spin states and each can be separately characterised, and no two trains can occupy the same state at the same time, in this case the state of being the 2008. Me, I'm firmly in the Copenhagen-interpretation camp, but I suspect most ticket collectors are in the many-worlds interpretation camp - "yes, there is some other universe where this train isn't the 2008 anymore, but I'm in this universe, it is, so cough up please".

 

[sheddy]

Is it OK providing you get on a train by the same Train Operating Company ?
No use at the moment, but I read somewhere that when the printed ticket details get redesigned eventually then the TOC will be printed on them.

 

[vernon]

Is it OK providing you get on a train by the same Train Operating Company ?

Nope. The booking is for specific seats on the specified train. It would be pointless operating a booking system otherwise.

 

[threebikesmcginty]

Do you remember the ride to Cleethorpes when the trains were expected to be buggered up by cabling theft?
I caught a much earlier train so that...

Some people whiled away a few hours drinking breakfast beers with the charming locals and by the time they staggered onto the train the cables had been mended.

 

[Archeress]

When I had to go for my surgery in Brighton I travelled by train from Exeter, via London. The train from Exeter was delayed by 10 minutes and the train for Brighton was on time so I missed the connection. I was told that my ticket was okay for travel on the later train to Brighton. I was almost an hour late getting to the hospital as a result, not the easy journey I had hoped for given the major sugery and 8 days in hospital with 3 month recoveryy period.

Hugs
Archeress x