From: Peter van der Mark
Topic: Station closures

Ticket salespeople are expensive and their services could be replaced by far cheaper fast ticket machines and internet sales, thus allowing station facilities to close. Can they really?

I noticed that the population in general, resident and foreign, has not much of a clue what the pros and cons of British rail tickets are. Walk-on (?) and Advance (?) tickets, peak, off-peak and super off-peak, how should electronically ordered tickets be retrieved, home-printed e-tickets (Why not install a safe printing facility for e-tickets for those people who obtain tickets with their laptop or mobile phone? Where else than on a station in or near a booking office? Or send them to the nearest hotel, as seems to happen now?)

What the conditions for travel are, such as the non-flexible commitment to a specific train of cheap to moderately expensive APEX tickets and the increased flexibility of the more expensive tickets.

Also, next to different peak and off-peak times per direction the company-specific discount tickets are eternal bugbears. Thus, how to tell foreigners in advance that their cheap flight from Frankfurt, Paris and Amsterdam to destinations in Britain may end up being increased threefold in cost due to missing (or being far too early for) their pre-booked Advance ticket train and now paying for the peak-hour train journey that follows the flight?

The journey planner system used to put tickets together, incidentally, has a few routeing quirks that may cost people (again, indigenous as well as foreign) quite severely when they didn’t notice the quirk.

In Bristol I experienced this. It concerns the automatic routeing of Swindon and Paddington bound passengers from Temple Meads via a change of train at Bristol Parkway, whereby their Advance ticket train reservation starts at Parkway and not at Temple Meads, if that – at the time – offers the “best” journey time. Time and again passengers appear to report at the Temple Meads ticket office with an Advance ticket ex Parkway to ask where they'll find their train to London, with not a chance in the world to still get a timely train to Parkway to catch their booked train there. You missed your booked train, buy a new ticket, is then the word. And then travel directly from Temple Meads Eastwards to add insult to injury, because you don’t have to go via Parkway. Have a look for yourself on the ticket sales websites.

Some day, I fear, especially this type of anomaly may blow up in the face of the TOCs when some more than usually on-the-ball kind of reporter gets hold of this “ticket scam”. And the TOCs defending themselves with the remark that people should take a good look at what they buy before clicking is not really going to help them when it is clear already that the necessary geographical knowledge of the rail network, among the British but certainly among foreign passengers, usually runs from absurdly minimal to absolutely non-existent. The same, incidentally, counts for company-specific discount tickets, people have at best heard about “Virgin”, but that is about it.

Britain’s rail network is not the only one where this development takes place. In the Netherlands, for instance, tickets and services at a ticket window are surcharged automatically and manned ticket windows have at the same time become few and far between over there, so you’ll use the fast ticket machines whether you lump it or love it. This also means, incidentally, that using your railwaymen’s FIP half-price ticket is increasingly becoming irrelevant when you happen to lodge away from a seriously major station, as the fast ticket machines can’t calculate the proper FIP discount. If these machines in the Netherlands can actually deal with your credit or debit card at all, because they operate a local electronic payment system called Chipknip in Holland and for obvious reasons no cash. For the indigenous that may not be so bad in the light that the ticketing system is far more transparent and a great deal simpler than that in Britain, so passengers feel more certain that they’re doing the right thing when putting their tickets together. And they all carry Chipknip cards to pay with. But for a – lesser-informed – foreigner it is simply infuriating.

In Britain, incidentally, sending all people to the fast ticket machines instead of ticket windows simply is not much of an option as mistakes (advance versus walk-on, wrong date, wrong time of the day, single versus day-return versus period return) are far too easily made and can be very costly indeed. And where do all those mistakes end up? At the nearest ticket window. As do all those other bits of misery caused by anything from simple misunderstanding to sheer stupidity. You’ll need to offer assistance one way or another. Minors, lost without tickets and no money late in the evening?

I also look at the drive to close manned station ticket facilities as the beginning of a slow but certain commercial suicide. With the present dwindling financial resources that the majority of people have at their disposition, versus their uncertainty to obtain the best rail ticket prices under guidance of a decent ticket clerk, they'll partially react with postponing or cancelling travel plans and for the absolutely necessary travel they’ll go and look for cheaper alternatives, as they increasingly do already. If I ran a bus or coach company I’d be doing my sums to ensure I can obtain extra transport capacity rapidly if the time comes.

In short, through taking away the assistance from ticket clerks without obtaining anywhere near decently priced train tickets I predict increasingly sharply rising discontent with rail travel among the financially hard-hit public, concurrent falling of train travel levels at some point in the not too distant future and with that interesting times ahead with respect to grand plans such as HS2 and IEP.