Train Ticket collection at Fast Ticket machines

[StuartG]

Maybe this 30 ticket system was a design feature - to encourage you to consider a season ticket!


Unlike the OP I find the requesting of the code when you have only one ticket booked to be inconsistent. Sometimes it asks, sometimes it doesn't. I don't know whether this is connected with whom you booked the ticket (sometimes I use Southern, other times Great Western).

 

[summerdays]

Last time I went on a single journey with my 3 children it resulted in about 17 individual printed tickets ... 2 different trains with seat bookings. When I got to the gates I found it easier just to give the pile to the person on the gate to sort out (he could see me struggling with them and luggage), and on the train I accidentally gave my seat booking instead of the ticket to the train inspector.

I'm sure they could make it easier.

 

[Amanda P]

EXACTLY!!!!!

Not hard, is it?

What will have happened is that Network Rail or whoever will have specified what they wanted the programming of the machine to do, and put the job out to tender. They will then have contracted the cheapest contractor to do the job. A software specialist wrote the code to make it do exactly what was specified - and nothing more. There will have been the option to do extra work at punitive costs - because that's the only way contractors make any money on these sort of deals (I know - sometimes I'm one).

By the time someone realised some extra code to do what Arch suggested would be a good idea, the money to actually get the original contractor back to add it in would have been long gone. So now we're stuck with the system that's there.

Many of the half-baked systems and buildings I work with were built this way!

And why is it so massively expensive to go by train. Me and the wife needed to go to York a little while ago, we thought about going by train, £152 return and that didn't include the 50 mile car journey to and from the station + a couple of taxi journeys in york. So we went by car £33 for diesel. And the car journey was probably quicker!

Be fair: if you add in the cost of buying, owning, taxing, insuring and maintaining the car, it's probably a bit more than that. But still probably not £152.

Anyone remember that story about a party of journos who bought, taxed and insured a car, filled it with fuel and drove it from London to a conference in Newcastle (?) for less than the cost of the train fare?

 

[al78]

I can understand the phenomenon of several tickets to fill in a journey, adding up to less than one ticket for the whole stretch. Years ago I discovered that to travel from London to Brighton, it was cheaper to buy a ticket from London to Three Bridges and then another from Three Bridges to Brighton. Problem was, the fastest trains didn't stop at Three Bridges, so how do you jump off at Three Bridges to buy the second ticket ? Of course this was before the days of online tickets and advance purchase...

Split tickets are only valid if the train stops at the station where the tickets join.

But yes, they can be cheaper, usually when the journey straddles the peak/off peak time zones, so the first ticket is peak rate and the second is off peak rate.

 

[Archie_tect]

I always get mine posted by East Coast ever since my son missed a train when the Fast Ticket machine wouldn't recognise his card.

Travelling to London from Newcastle I was recently told by a regular user to, next time, get the peak period ticket [just to to Doncaster or Grantham where the off peak timings started for my journey timings... then an off peak for the remainder of the journey, using East Coast but not actually getting off and on again, with my first leg reserving the seat so I could just sit there happily... then returning off peak to Darlington with the peak hours one on the train I was catching back to Newcastle.

I haven't tried it yet- I presume it's worth the hassle but as the last one down cost me £34.50 and the return cost £7.50 booking well in advance I've never checked the reality of whether the multi-ticket on-line booking does save any more.

Biggest problem on East Coast is the confusion when they have to omit or close a carriage due to technical problems and move all the reservations around in the remaining carriages without telling you.

 

[SavageHoutkop]

Travelling to London from Newcastle I was recently told by a regular user to, next time, get the peak period ticket [just to to Doncaster or Grantham where the off peak timings started for my journey timings... then an off peak for the remainder of the journey, using East Coast but not actually getting off and on again, with my first leg reserving the seat so I could just sit there happily... then returning off peak to Darlington with the peak hours one on the train I was catching back to Newcastle.

I get offered the option of reserving a seat for the non-advance/off-peak tickets on my journey as well, so I get to pick the same seat (just in case) for my whole trip.

 

[SavageHoutkop]

Maybe this 30 ticket system was a design feature - to encourage you to consider a season ticket!

I've considered one, it'd certainly make my life easier, £6,788.00 for a year vs my current approx £3,500.

 

[Kirstie]

***NB***

If you are due a new bank card, don't book any rail tickets and opt to collect them in the fast ticket machine, if, like me, you always choose to cut up your old cards when you receive a new one. The machine won't allow you to collect your tickets using your new bank card and you'll have to buy an extortionately priced ticket at the station. The station staff can't access the system with your booking reference to issue the tickets, and when you claim the cost back of the ticket you failed to collect, you get charged a £10 admin fee, and they email you about it for months afterwards...bah!

 

[661-Pete]

***NB***

If you are due a new bank card, don't book any rail tickets and opt to collect them in the fast ticket machine, if, like me, you always choose to cut up your old cards when you receive a new one.

I always try to avoid like the plague, any online buying system which insists that you have to present the card you used to buy online, at a later date. Too much risk that you won't have the card any more! Not just because it has expired, but what if you have lost it, or had it stolen, or unauthorised use and you got the bank to cancel it?

The one exception, which I can't see any way out of, is car hire. If you book it with credit card (usually they don't accept debit cards), they insist that you present the same credit card when you go to collect the car. I suppose you could ring them up beforehand if you know you aren't going to have that card...

 

[661-Pete]

Regarding unusual ticket requests - it used to be worse before the days of ticket machines! Cue my one-and-only instance of (inadvertant) fare-dodging. You won't be shopping me once I've supplied the details: it was over thirty years ago! I was trying to get a single ticket from some remote rural station on the Medway (I forget which one) to Tonbridge, where I was due to connect with a train for which I already had a ticket. Remote Rural Station was unstaffed, there was a notice saying 'pay the guard' or something. Trouble was, the train I boarded was an old-fashioned compartment carriage (they don't exist any more) with no access to the guard. This train terminated at an intermediate larger station, Paddock Wood, so I though, fine, while waiting for the connection I'll pop up to the ticket office at Paddock Wood and get the ticket. But they said, no can do, cannot sell a ticket from A to B at station C or some rigmarole. So they told me, get my ticket at Tonbridge. Fine. Got on the connection, reached Tonbridge, change again but this time I was just in the nick of time to make my connection out of Tonbridge. No time to buy ticket. I never did pay that fare. But no-one can say I didn't try ...

 

[Bromptonaut]

Another question - if anyone knows the answer.

When you book online you have to specify the station you want to pick the tickets up at. Is this actually enforced, and if so why? Surely they all belong to the same network of machines?

I only mentioned LM above because they operate my local station and it's their machines I use most. TBH I'd be surprised if others were siginifcantly different as (a) I can opt to pick tickets up anywhere and (b) the system spec is likley to be defined by ATOC in sich a way as to be even handed.

On specifiying the pick up station. I've never tried to pick up elsewhere but given the ARE YOU SURE message I get when requesting Northampton collection for tickets to be used out of Euston I think it must matter. One hypothesis would be that the data is sent to the collecting machine asap and stored in it's local memory so there's less scope for transient data transmission glitches to spoil peoples entire journey!!

And on another point. Although the rules generally require a train stop at the point where multiple tickets adjoin this is not the case where one is a season and the other is not.

 

[661-Pete]

And on another point. Although the rules generally require a train stop at the point where multiple tickets adjoin this is not the case where one is a season and the other is not.

I think I've chanced it, in the past, even with single tickets for both legs, but I don't recall whether I ever got my tickets checked on the train. Haven't done that recently. It'll probably be in the small print somewhere. One gripe I have, of quite the opposite nature, was a couple of days ago, when the barriers wouldn't let me through at a mid-point stop, even though I had to pass them in order to change trains and I held a through ticket (it was at St Pancras, I was switching between train companies, possibly that was the problem?). At least there were staff on hand, and they let me through without question.

 

[Flying Dodo]

I always try to avoid like the plague, any online buying system which insists that you have to present the card you used to buy online, at a later date. Too much risk that you won't have the card any more! Not just because it has expired, but what if you have lost it, or had it stolen, or unauthorised use and you got the bank to cancel it?

Although by not using the online booking system, you're missing out on massive savings on train fares. For example, for tonight's FNRttC, if I'd remembered yesterday to book my ticket for coming back from Brighton to London Victoria on Saturday, it would have been £5. Buying it today cost me £5.65, although there were still some £3.75 fares available for earlier departures. The walk on fare bought at Brighton Station is £9.20 (with a railcard). For the York one, I think my ticket was about £15, compared with a walk on fare of £90 or so.

The tickets are available for collection from any station in the UK you designate (doesn't have to be the departure point), within 2 hours of buying, so very little chance of me having to cancel the card in between!

 

[661-Pete]

Although by not using the online booking system, you're missing out on massive savings on train fares.

Er - no, I didn't mean that I don't use online booking at all: what I meant was that I don't use long-term advance purchase, maybe weeks ahead, and then expect to collect the tickets at the station on the day. In such cases I always ask for the tickets to be posted. And I usually use this only for longer journeys, most of my shorter trips e.g. to London or Brighton, are 'spur of the moment'.

However, if I can get the discounts you mention, it looks worth trying!

I believe there's only a small quota of these discount tickets: once they've all gone you go up to the next price bracket!

 

[Flying Dodo]

Very true re the quotas of tickets. The early bird catches the worm.

What amazes me about the whole on line ticket business, is why people use the trainline.com, who charge £1 extra, even if you pick up the tickets at the station. I tend to use Southern's web site for most of my train ticket purchases as it's very user friendly, although I'm registered with a few others, as some (like Southern) give extra discounts for journeys within their own region.