Free Train Rides in Lockdown

[Andy Kirkham]

I've travelled several times in recent weeks on the Severn Beach line (where all stations after Temple Meads are unstaffed ) and on no occasion has anyone attempted to sell me (or anyone else, seemingly) a ticket.

 

I'm wondering how widespread this practice is.

[John M Upton]

On Southern, we had our ticket machines withdrawn when the lockdown commenced due to social distancing requirements and there is no sign of them being reinstated anytime soon.

 

I believe this to be the case across all TOC's at the moment.

[Oldddudders]

So, services are currently being run for the benefit of the passenger? Tut, tut - that will never do. 

[Wickham Green too]

And if everywhere else is like London the Government taxpayer will be picking up the bill and insisting on massive  price hikes once this thing is over ...... oops getting political again !

[Wheatley]

Revenue collection was deemed to be too high risk / low benefit when the infection rate was 6000 per day and hardly anyone was travelling (and the government was underwriting the costs). Now it's down in the hundreds (for now) expect it to be reintroduced.

Edited July 27, 2020 by Wheatley
To remove reference to gatelines which I shojld have known have operated (almost) throughout.

[Oldddudders]

Sadly the Safety Case for a gateline installation insists on there being a gateline geezer to deal with the inevitable tickets that don't work, and to hit the Open button if there is an emergency. In few cases are these geezers not on site, i.e. via CCTV links. I suspect these people will not be comfy about facing the public any time soon. 

[caradoc]

I recently started travelling by train again, and on each occasion I passed through Glasgow Central the gates were operational and therefore, of course, staffed. There was however no ticket inspection on any train, great for the passenger in the short term perhaps but totally unsustainable long-term.

 

Other stations I used which have gates are Paddington, Oxford and Birmingham New St, and again the gates were working and staffed, except at Oxford at 0630, but I think that is the case normally anyway !

 

 

[Gwiwer]

Gatelines have been attended and operational in London and the SWR area for the duration of the emergency with the exception of a very short period.  There will always be times when unplanned staff absence means the gates are opened despite the best intentions.  

 

Gateline staff were withdrawn one morning at sign-on without warning and were sent home.  It was considered they were not essential.  Following numerous objections on the grounds of public safety and security by police and other emergency services they were reinstated next day though some didn't get the message immediately.  Revenue collection was not mentioned as a reason.  

 

These staff now operate from either a hut, office or taped-off area according to the local configuration.  One gate has sometimes been left open to reduce the number of close interactions.  

 

On-train staff are neither selling nor checking tickets for now; as John says it is considered a very high-risk situation asking guards / OBS / conductors to closely interact with passengers and also risk confrontation when revenue collection is enforced.  TTI staff are I believe still furloughed in the main but some are at work in key station locations.

 

With the government effectively having turned the franchised railway into a fee-for-service operation the need to set staff health and safety set against possible infection and assault risks means that it is possible to travel without payment in many cases.  That remains contrary to the conditions of carriage however and a valid ticket / pass / smartcard / authority is still required for travel.  Gateline staff can advise those without such to purchase tickets before admission to the station.  

[Jim Martin]

My daughter travelled from Liverpool to Glasgow two weeks ago and the gate line at Lime Street was operating and staffed.

 

Jim

[Darius43]

19 hours ago, John M Upton said:

On Southern, we had our ticket machines withdrawn when the lockdown commenced due to social distancing requirements and there is no sign of them being reinstated anytime soon.

 

I believe this to be the case across all TOC's at the moment.

 

You can still buy a ticket from the machine on the platform though - or have these machines been removed?

 

Darius

Edited July 27, 2020 by Darius43

[Gwiwer]

2 hours ago, Darius43 said:

 

You can still buy a ticket from the machine on the platform though - or have these machines been removed?

 

Darius

Platform and booking hall machines are still in use.  In most (possibly all) cases they have been adapted to only accept card payments to avoid cash-handling at all points.  At one stage they also had advance-purchase ticketing disabled as it was felt to be a leisure product which perhaps should not have been available for essential-only travel.  They have been returned to offering the normal range of tickets since travel restrictions were eased.  

 

In many cases these machines have been the only way to pay for a journey unless a smart card was used.  

[John M Upton]

There has been a big push on the smart cards too although I don't think there has been that much of a take up out here on the coast, tends to be more of a London thing really.

Edited July 27, 2020 by John M Upton

[Gwiwer]

3 minutes ago, John M Upton said:

smart cards ...... tends to be more of a London thing really.

London plus .....

 

The usual large volume of traffic heads to Thorpe Park most days now things are open.  For which the nearest station is Staines.  Almost all carry London Oyster Cards which don't get you any closer to Staines than Feltham.  Colleagues at Staines have requested on several occasions that guards announce the limit of validity to avoid congestion at the barriers when they all alight.  That's £3.90 excess fare (adult) plus £20 penalty fare (for failing to buy a ticket when there was reasonable opportunity) making an expensive start to the day.

 

We regularly - almost daily - have folks travelling to Windsor and expecting to get there on Oyster cards thinking that "Windsor is in London".  It's not.  £.5.70 excess plus £20 penalty.  But here's the thing.  The Visitor's Oyster Card which is a specifically tourist-oriented product is valid but only from Paddington via Slough to Windsor Central and not by any SWR route to Windsor Riverside.  However no other Oyster product is valid to Windsor at all.  Confusion?  Much.  

 

I have been asked if an Oyster Card will take the user to Birmingham and Glasgow.  It will take you to Gatwick Airport (because by special arrangement point-to-point fares can be charged for that journey) but not to Stansted, Southend or Luton Airports.  And all of those from John's part of the world holding Key smart cards expecting to find them accepted in London are equally frustrated and disillusioned.  

 

These cards - not so smart, actually   

[Wickham Green too]

....... and the ticket machines aren't a lot of help when they're not programmed to recognise smart cards : If you turn up at an unmanned station, wanting to go beyond your smart card validity, you can't simply slot your card into the ticket machine - or swipe it - to get the excess to your destination ....... no choice but to pay on the train or on arrival ( whatever the earliest opportunity ).

[Nearholmer]

All of which highlights the need for a really serious “start again from a blank sheet” on public transport (not just rail) fares and revenue collection in Britain.

 

For revenue collection, “touch in; touch out”  using a debit card or equivalent works exceedingly well - it is really practical. But, I think it might hit challenges when it comes to journeys that exceed current contactless payment limits, so might have to be modified to ‘key-in; touch-out”. It also needs ‘workarounds’ for people who don’t have a debit card or equivalent, and for there to be arrangements for Reserving seats in advance.

 

But, that is only half of the equation. The really big problem, is the lack of transparency in the fares structures ....... nobody would be mad enough to use “touch-in; touch-out” if they couldn’t easily understand in advance what they would be paying for a given trip at a given time.
 

The fares structure desperately needs to be simplified, probably so that it gets back to only two factors: distance, and time of travel, with all the advance-discounts, discounting for returns, differences between operators, etc. stripped-out, and it needs to be made clearly visible through an online ‘fare checker’ or similar, which allows people to see the fare A-to-B with any differences according to time of travel, so that they have a simple choice of when to travel based on price.
 

It’s one of the things that needs to be sorted if rail travel is to be encouraged as a way of achieving energy efficiency. Getting people back on trains and busses  as coronavirus is controlled will be hard enough, without bonkers fare structures and revenue collection arrangements persisting.

 

 

Edited July 28, 2020 by Nearholmer

[Oldddudders]

The present fare structure owes its roots to Sectorisation, when stuffing the other lot became part of the game, and airline practices like APEX were regarded as the way to go. Stepping back from that to a unified fare structure seems unlikely any time soon unless the Government does some very different deals with the TOCs. Whether those in charge at the DfT have anything like the capability to devise a route from here to there seems a remote possibility. 

[Nearholmer]

If you look at the various reports and pronouncements on the subject, it seems that the fact of all this being a stinging nettle In the flower-bed is well recognised, but nobody wants to grasp it firmly and give a good pull.

 

Now would actually be the ideal moment To set a new direction, given the degree to which public transport is currently on tax-funded life-support.

[Gwiwer]

3 hours ago, Nearholmer said:

The fares structure desperately needs to be simplified, probably so that it gets back to only two factors: distance, and time of travel, with all the advance-discounts, discounting for returns, differences between operators, etc. stripped-out, and it needs to be made clearly visible through an online ‘fare checker’ or similar, which allows people to see the fare A-to-B with any differences according to time of travel, so that they have a simple choice of when to travel based on price.

Without straying too far from the topic into a very much larger and infinitely complex one there are many factors at work here.  

 

The fares structure could indeed be simplified but even under the "rose-tinted" BR days it was never quite as simple as "Ordinary or Cheap-Day".  There were exceptions to many rules, well- or little-known workarounds used by more or less people, localised fares structures to meet localised market demands or to stimulate specific markets.  Even, dare I say it, to suppress some markets such as the price of some fares on the Settle & Carlisle when BR was trying everything they could to shut it down.  

 

The National Rail app available on smart phones and the equivalent desktop / laptop site will offer a good selection of fares and has the option to program alternative routes.  There is a "cheapest fare finder" page within that which is also of use to enough people that it is maintained.  I use it myself occasionally.  

 

There are problematic areas.  Far from everyone has a smart phone.  Not all use payment cards with some still being "cash-only" members of society.  Incompatible systems overlap but require often fussy customer action to prevent overcharging or inadvertent fare evasion.  The passenger who boards at Peckham Rye and changes at Clapham Junction for Reading may well tap in using a card at point of origin and might remember to tap on the pink reader when they change trains at Clapham (which exists to prove travel is not via Zone 1 but is far from foolproof) and then wants to know where they can tap out because they have a paper ticket from Feltham (Zone 6 Boundary) to Reading.  Short of hopping off at Feltham and touching out thereby missing your own train and waiting another half-hour there is no way.  You could buy a paper ticket throughout but most London people are used to touching a card these days.  

 

A small but frustrating problem area is that staff fares are not available from machines nor online.  One must book in person.  There are not as many open ticket offices as there once were to do that.  Instructions are to pay at the first opportunity (guard, interchange point or destination) and use a Promise to Pay voucher where available at point of origin.  Machine-readable ID cards are coming and so is online booking but not yet.  

 

One database with every permutation of fare and journey in the UK would be horrendous.  With the best systems available each tap-out might take quite a few seconds while the database was interrogated and charged your fare.  That might be OK at a quiet rural station but it isn't OK as people queue in their hundreds to exit platforms at London terminals.  The Australian State of Victoria attempted to bring everything onto one system (called Myki - my key) and created 82 zones in an area about the size of England.  The lag time at exit was in the order of 3 - 4 seconds despite most users only making trips within zones 1 or 2.  Regional coach and rail services still don't have full rollout around 15 years later.  Expand that by the number of stations in the UK - or even by a smaller number if they could be zoned ..... it doesn't work efficiently.  

[Nearholmer]

If you attempt it with stored value or attempt to make the charge at the moment of exit, it does indeed become impossible, but that isn’t how practical systems work - they note your entry to the system, note your exit, work out the fare “at their leisure“, then charge you later.

 

Where multi-trip discounts apply, or where a daily or weekly cap applies (more an urban travel thing), they apply that before debiting you’re account.

 

And, I’m not advocating a return to BR fare structures - they were too complicated themselves. I’m advocating Something simpler: fare A-to-B = X, with maybe three “time bands”, normal, one up, and one down to discourage peak travel and encourage travel at slack periods.

 

Seasons, and returns are redundant concepts anyway, with seasons often actually acting to reward travel at peak periods, which is exceedingly perverse.
 

I agree about the challenge of people who don't have means to pay electronically - ‘minors’ are an obvious instance, but there are other ‘non electronic’ customers too. But it isn’t beyond the wit of man to resolve those questions.

[caradoc]

8 hours ago, Nearholmer said:

But, that is only half of the equation. The really big problem, is the lack of transparency in the fares structures ....... nobody would be mad enough to use “touch-in; touch-out” if they couldn’t easily understand in advance what they would be paying for a given trip at a given time.

 

I agree with that.

 

8 hours ago, Nearholmer said:

The fares structure desperately needs to be simplified, probably so that it gets back to only two factors: distance, and time of travel, with all the advance-discounts, discounting for returns, differences between operators, etc. stripped-out

 

I don't agree with that !

While it may be complicated, offering for example cheap advance fares benefits both the passenger (eg my Mum for who I booked a First Class return Birmingham/Glasgow with Avanti for £100 total, a trip which unfortunately did not occur due to the virus), and the train operator, by enabling them to direct passengers to, and fill, lesser-used trains, which might well vary on different dates and even for different segments of the journey. And aligning fares between operators eliminates what level of competition exists now; I'm not sure why a Birmingham-London fare, for example, should be the same on Avanti, Chiltern or LNWR, each of which offers a different level of service.

 

 

[Nearholmer]

Read my follow-up post regarding time bands.

 

I’m utterly unconvinced that competition is currently doing anything useful for anybody on the national rail network, so I’m going to be hard to convince on that score.

[corneliuslundie]

In the past when I travelled from Newtown Powys to Cardiff, changing at Shrewsbury, Gareth at the (unfortunately now closed) Newtown Travel Centre) provided me with three tickets - Newtown-Shrewsbury, Shrewsbury-Cwmbran and Cwmbran-Cardiff - because that is the cheapest option. Is any ticket machine (or App) going to offer me that? And anyway I do not have or want a smartphone.

There must be thousands of situations like this.

Jonathan

[Nearholmer]

All that does is demonstrate my point: that fare-structures past and present were/are too complex for anyone’s good. The need to buy three tickets to get the cheapest fare is just plain a daft - an unintended consequence of a too-clever-by-half fare structure. The fare structure needs to be simplified.

 

BTW, you don’t need a smart phone for touch-in/touch-out; you need a debit card. Try it next time you go to London.

 

I’m not advocating something from another planet - what I’m outlining is what works a treat in London, plus time-banding (which I think LT may actually be using, or certainly contemplating, now).

 

It needs no stored-value card to work ...... it lets you buy travel the same way you buy shopping, by debiting your bank account.

 

If you try to fit simple ways of paying to the existing arcane fare structures it Almost certainly won’t work; both the fare structure and the revenue collection need to be simple. And, there’s no good reason they can’t be ...... it’s just that we’ve got ourselves tied-up in knotS of complexity that need to be sliced-through.

 

 

[phil-b259]

32 minutes ago, Nearholmer said:

All that does is demonstrate my point: that fare-structures past and present were/are too complex for anyone’s good. The need to buy three tickets to get the cheapest fare is just plain a daft - an unintended consequence of a too-clever-by-half fare structure. The fare structure needs to be simplified.

 

BTW, you don’t need a smart phone for touch-in/touch-out; you need a debit card. Try it next time you go to London.

 

I’m not advocating something from another planet - what I’m outlining is what works a treat in London, plus time-banding (which I think LT may actually be using, or certainly contemplating, now).

 

It needs no stored-value card to work ...... it lets you buy travel the same way you buy shopping, by debiting your bank account.

 

If you try to fit simple ways of paying to the existing arcane fare structures it Almost certainly won’t work; both the fare structure and the revenue collection need to be simple. And, there’s no good reason they can’t be ...... it’s just that we’ve got ourselves tied-up in knotS of complexity that need to be sliced-through.

 

 

 

Unfortunately those knots are mainly there due to (1) the fact that the privatisation legislation forbids anyone tampering with them and / or (2) any change breaks previous contracts / franchise agreements made by the DfT and would result in large compensation being paid by HM Treasury.

 

While the second point can in principle be addressed by inserting suitable protecting clauses / breakpoints when contracts are let, its worthwhile reminding folk that to write such things into the contract requires an idea of roughly what changes might be happen - a broad statement like 'we reserve the right to change the fare structure' won't wash as far as the legal industry is concerned. All Franchise agreements are legal contracts and any potential variation away from them must be agreed in advance or compensation paid

 

However the bigger problem is the the first point. As I have pointed out before, back in 1993 / 1994 in an era before Smartphones, contactless payments, etc and when people were worried that privatisation would need you to buy separate tickets from each operator to complete your journey for example, the Government went and fixed lots of things in PRIMARY legislation.

 

Primary legislation cannot be changed by ministerial decisions - it needs a new bill (written in that overly bureaucratic legal language which lay folk struggle to understand) to be approved by MPs in a vote at Westminster and given the Queens assent to get it changed.

 

For example it is laid out in primary legislation that you must always be sold a through ticket for your journey (even if its more expensive) than separate ones for each leg (unless you specifically ask a ticket clerk / 3rd party website) to do so. This may seem like an odd thing to do over two decades on, but in the early 1990s those opposed to privatisation made a great thing about the fear of everyone having to physically buy a new ticket from each operator they travelled with - so to neutralise the argument it was specifically stated in law that the BR system of issuing end to end tickets by default would continue.

 

Similarly things like season tickets and Advance purchase fares are legally protected in their current form in primary legislation, to address fears that the new privatised railway would ditch them to the detriment of users while boosting profits significantly.

 

Therefore while almost everybody (including the TOCs as well as the DfT) agrees rail fares need reform - its a FACT that reform has to start with Civil servants deciding what they want, then MPs finding time to pass a bill to enact it - in amongst all the other things which could be legitimately said to be important (Covid 19 fallout, Brexit fallout, etc over the next few years.

 

Once that has been done, and with rail franchising having effectively been abandoned (current thinking seems to be to do it on a concession basis going forward where fare revenue remains with the Government) then it should be fairly easy to implement it....

 

.... but ultimately nothing CAN happen until the PRIMARY legislation passed back in 1993 /1994 is revised.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Nearholmer]

I hope to goodness someone has the sense and courage (not qualities seen together in most transport ministers since about 1968) to deal with that then - because it seriously needs to be dealt with.

 

(interesting object lesson in why overly prescriptive/proscriptive legislation is a nightmare)