Not snooping or anything (661Pete), but to be honest a possibility of fare dodging had obviously crossed my mind as I'd just noticed this for a few months now.
Ah, perhaps I shouldn't have used that word. TBH I feel pretty much the same about fare dodging. Or certainly used to, in the days when I used to go by train a lot.
Which brings to mind a tale. This was from many years ago when fares and ticketing were very different from now. A colleague used to commute daily from Lewes to Brighton - an 8-mile journey. In those days you could buy a 3-monthly return, either the outward or the return journey could be done within the 3-month timeline. It was printed on a single cardboard ticket, not the 2-part ticket they give you today. The idea was to simply show the ticket to the collector on the way out, and hand it in on the return leg. Sometimes the collector would punch the ticket to show that the outward journey had been done, sometimes not. For the purpose of my colleague's dodge, he had to avoid this happening.
So what was my colleague's 'dodge' then? He bought two return tickets of course, one for Lewes to Brighton and back, and one for Brighton to Lewes and back. He showed the outward-going ticket to the collector each time. So he used the same tickets over and over again.
The collectors got suspicious after a while, and alerted the Transport Police. They put a plain-clothes tail on my colleague, and arrested him just outside Lewes station in full view of all the other commuters. He admitted the offence and a lot of 'previous' he'd done, and was summonsed to appear before the local Magistrates.
Then he had the effrontery to ask me to 'cover' for him at work, avoid telling the boss why he was having a day off to appear in court. At that point I lost my cool. I said, it's your problem mate, you walked into it, you sort it...
He got a fine. And was ordered to pay up all the outstanding fares. He was told he'd narrowly escaped a prison sentence, mainly because he'd 'fessed up.
End of story.
