Nobody gets rid of our ticket offices.

@hawkerhellfire9152

11 ай бұрын

The Thatcherites will try their best. You'd do well to kick them out.

Thank you so much to everyone commenting on this issue. The rail internet community is great, and as a group, I know that we can keep ticket offices and guards on the trains!

Thank you Chris Green I suffer from autism and epilepsy I use the ticket office all the time because I can’t spell on a machine when you use a rail discard and a freedom pass from London but you need to get the right ticket from a right zone in London so I find this so difficult to ticket office so I can get the right ticket from Darren Hickey Hornsby GWR

I like this style of GTI, Great work Chris 👍

Thank you for highlighting my comment. I remember travelling home from work after a late shift. The ticket office at Bescot Stadium was closed. The card reader on the ticket machine was broken. I had the money for the fare in cash but there wasn't a note reader. I didn't have the fare in coins. There was no sign of a Guard on the train either. When I arrived at Birmingham New Street, I was fortunate enough to find someone at the ticket office. I asked to buy a ticket from Bescot Stadium to my destination on the Cross City line. I explained the situation which he accepted. He thanked me for my honestly and charged me for a ticket from New Street. If I had someone less sympathetic, I could have been fined. I have had problems with ticket barriers opening on a number of occasions even with a valid ticket as well. If it wasn't for a human being there I wouldn't have been able to exit the station. Equally I'm concerned for public safety. It's not as if a machine can call the Police or for an ambulance if needed. Furthermore, anyone with a disability will be discriminated against travelling. They won't receive the assistance they need. Anyone with impaired sight can't use a ticket machine. Wheelchair users need a ramp to get on the train. On driver only operations this could lead to a scenario where the driver is assisting a passenger, only for someone unscrupulous to jump in the cab, close the doors and drive the train. To me it's an example of putting profit before people; encouraging them to take to the roads or the air instead.

Getting rid of cash is all very well but what happens if the card machine doesn't work or the WiFi goes down?

i think this set of videos shows just how much we need our ticket offices

Glad to see my comment was included on here and it's good to see many people here want to keep the ticket offices open. :)

Thank you for highlighting my comment, I did mean to say that tickets usually have a 2-3 hour limit on their use.

Thank you for highlighting these issues. I have sent my concerns to the Rail Delivery Group! 👍

Today I was trying to board the 0902 off peak service. TVM was only offering a peak ticket. Ticket office supplied the off peak I wanted. Even having a member of staff floating around they wouldn't be able to change what the TVM is offering.

This reminds me of something a few stations in my area do. The stations are a lot more than just stations, they're cafes/restaurants, book shops, shops for various other things, and while having cafes on station platforms is nothing new, it's a little different. Ravensbourne is a couple of stations north of me, and it's pretty quiet, only a half hourly service or so, but there's this literal hole in the wall at the entrance that a guy runs as a cafe spot. There's a table and garden chairs in the bike shed and people gather for a drink and a bite to eat. At Elmstead Woods, the ticket office has a whole area dedicated to second hand books for people to buy and the station staff look after it. I don't know what the arrangement is with places like these at stations, but I like to think in addition to some money going to the station staff, it's a nice place to be and people can meet and hang out there. Railway stations can potentially be so much more than railway stations, they can be community hotspots as well, which helps keep them open. Anyone else got any examples of this?

Thanks for reading my comment out. It's great to see that is so much agreement that these proposals are poorly thought through and are not good and will put off millions travelling by train. Hopefully someone is listening.

Im glad so many people have come forward about the dangers of removing the ticket offices, i honestly believe that they still will remove them, however it will be the publics response after there removal that will decide if they made a mistake or not....also unrelated but thats a beutiful portrait of the adams radial tank in the background and now i need to see if i can find one

As a spin-off regarding ticket offices, train staff, and fare dodgers. As a lot of the trains are running as multiples of three or four car sets, with no corridor between, if there is only one guard/ticket checker, he cannot easily get from one end to the other, so what is to stop a dodger on a line with (say ten) closed offices/broken machines - from saying they only got on at the last stop, when in fact they got on ten stops back? - - And, putting on my black suit - should the driver or a passenger be taken ill in between stations, if there is no guard, who will let the passengers out, or even tell them what is going on? - - Consider the dyslexic person trying to buy a ticket from a machine, when they cannot correctly spell the name of the destination station they want!

I'm genuinely flabbergasted that anyone could suggest such a radical change without properly thinking it through. Some of the stations that were on the list for potential closure, made no sense. For example, Reading; I've always seen a decently long queue & on many occasions, multiple ticket machines out of order. The reliability of ticket machines, is far from what is nessecary to rid ticket machines & most stations only have a small handful. My biggest concern with this whole proposal is that they claim the staff will be moved onto the platform, but will they? How can they guarentee there will always be staff available to help those on ticket machines?

Maybe I'm missing something here, but if you close the ticket offices but don't get rid of the staff, how much money do you actually save overall? I just don't see how this is supposed to work other than as a stepping stone towards redundancies.

@ChristheXelent

11 ай бұрын

That's pretty much what Mick Lynch is implying, given the legislation protecting ticket office staff.

Brilliant video Chris

Ticket offices deserve to stay

I have yet to encounter a cheaper ticker being offered by a ticket office than one purchased online. I avoid the Avanti machines at Stockport, although they have now improved (apparently).

We took the train last weekend from Okehampton to Exeter. The parking ticket machine dosnt take coins or cash, and the contactless beeper dosnt work half the time either. £2 for all day parking and you are forced to use chip and pin, in 2023 -_- The train ticket machines are easy to use, but are kinda slow sometimes. And theres only one ticket machine on the whole platform!!

The thing with the Netherlands is, one ticket lets you ride Trains, Buses and Trams to go to where you want to go. You can tap in and out across the entire country whereas here that is mostly just London with a few neighbouring towns. Train fares in the Netherlands are also distance based and fully integrated so easier to work out and certainly no need for split ticketing over there! We are a long way off from that here, so whilst things are so complicated with fares we need ticket offices to remain. Destaffing trains is incredibly stupid. To me 'modernisation' would be renationalisation of our public transport and centrally funded so it can be planned for our needs as a network not having individual competing routes, the different modes of transport integrated with each other so people don't feel the need to drive everywhere and making fares affordable and as easy to understand as possible. Only then we might not need ticket offices so much but with the way our trains are run at present, we need ticket offices more than ever.

facinating

As someone who's had to travel via Amtrak, and various states interurban trains, unstaffed stations on things like the Bay Area Rapid Transit, Max or Washington's version of the Oregon Max are normal, but most people who use the systems know the stations and schedules like the back of their hands and the general direction they need to go. Many stations have maps or sign boards for the major end points. Imagine coming from either another state or country to visit family and realize you know next to nothing about the interurban rail network and there's no-one around to ask and many of the travelers are tired, just getting off work and ready to unwind. Do you think they'll want to explain to some outsider about how something works? Sometimes only major junctions or major interchange points only have one soul telling sometimes hundreds of passengers where to go or what trains to catch. Sometimes Amtrak staff have to help the Max or Bay Area crews, but that requires Amtrak crews know the schedules of not only one, but two and sometimes three to seven trains. It's a pain in the back trying to find the correct station or correct train as they often cut services and some stations that don't carry their own wallet, and with that, they cut back staff hours and staff presence and even hours that trains run, meaning passengers have to catch the maze of buses and ubers, making things harder for the passengers. At places such as Rose Quarter, we have ONE staff member from Trimet, who is responisble for either handing out tickets when the machines go down or help take care of passengers. For some places, like major transit centers that have the odd ticket office, they serve no purpose other than being a waste of space. Back in the early days, people worked them and could manage everything and direct everyone, but it appears that as everything got complicated and as the transit systems expanded to towns to allow for people to take the train to their place of work/play, it seems that they cut staff, leaving the already ghost town like stations now looking more like an abandoned town from the 1800s. It really puts off traveling by such transit until or unless it's absolutely necessary.

Save ticket offices.

Since when is it fare dodging to go back to your stop after you miss it, it's not like you left a paid area, it should be the same journey.

How are they going to check tickets if they want Driver-Only operation? Will the Machines recognise a Disabled Access Pass Holder? I'm disabled and need help travelling. I am 25 miles by bus from my nearest Accessible Train Station and I have to book in advance on-line for everything now. Although I have booked Wheelchair Accessible places via National Rail Enquiries for the journeys on the Trains on-line, I've never yet got the Reservation made every time because the man on the platform and the Guard on the trains, refused to recognise that I had a Reservation Ticket for a Wheel-Chair Access place in my hand that was booked on the trains in question; although booked well in advance, as said, on-line via National Rail Enquiries, there was NO Reservation made for ON THE DAY. Perhaps, had I been able to book the Reservation at the Ticket Office at the station or had the option to pick up the Tickets from the Ticket Office, they'd have been more aware that YES, there is a Wheel-Chair Access place required and Booked in advance...maybe? Cheers Chris. (This is edited back to a reasonable length, apologies...)

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