Mass cull of ticket offices

[Michael Hodgson]

18 hours ago, rodent279 said:

In Holland recently, even the public loos (yeah I know, what are they?) were contactless card payments only.

You shouldn't expect to be able to spend a penny in a country that uses foreign money.

[Mike_Walker]

4 minutes ago, The Stationmaster said:

Something which a lpt of people don't know about or understand is teh difficulty and insecurity many people - of all ages - encounter when trying to  cope with a travel environment which is outside their personal control.  It doesn't just affect the railway but airports are a major example and in every case what the intending user of the place wants is reassurance from a competent human being.

 

I suspect our local booking office probably  has almost as many people asking questions as there are tickets issued (because many of those buying tickets also ask questions),  They want a knowledgeable and helpful person to reassure them and guide them on their way.   Many of the questions I have heard people ask in recent times could be answered in a a matter of seconds if you put the right question into a search engine.  But lots of people don't know what is the right question to ask although they know the answer they need.  That is the value of a competent human at a booking office window because they can get to the answer even if the initial question iw not quite right - machines can't always do that.

At our local station, on the next branch to Mike's, the clerk in the BO says he has an average 5-6 enquiries every day (only open Mon-Sat mornings) from folk who've encountered problems trying to book on line or with the TVM.

[SHMD]

 

This Whole episode has me fuming.

 

...and was completely unnecessary if only the policy originator had an once a micro-gram of common sense. (Yes I know, that’s why this got as far as it did – someone in power who is demonstrably detached from reality.)

What would have been the next saving? The removal of Disabled Ramps?! After all, hardly anyone (percentage wise of the population) uses them! Shakes head in disbelief again...

 

...and everyone here should try walking in another’s shoes before spouting how good something is, citing examples, of how you are competent/unaffected/better off.

 

The partially sighted, physically disabled, new customers passengers, dyslexic, incapable, occasional users, tourists, plus lots and lots of other groups – especially (but not least) the terminally bewildered (no shortage of them!) – all NEED human interaction.

(I count myself in at least 3 of the above categories, especially the last one!)

 

Another example…

 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/disability-67239870

 

...but no worries, the technology widely available – and most importantly – cheap to implement (little up front costs/investment/maintenance).

 

 

Kev.

(I do apologies for being very grumpy this morning, and please don’t take this personally – it’s just me getting my morning rant off my chest.)

 

[phil-b259]

1 hour ago, SHMD said:

 

This Whole episode has me fuming.

 

...and was completely unnecessary if only the policy originator had an once a micro-gram of common sense. (Yes I know, that’s why this got as far as it did – someone in power who is demonstrably detached from reality.)

 

However had he succeeded in pushing it through I’m sure he would have got lots of praise from the party faithful for lowering  Government spending which they have been told is a pre-requisite for tax cuts….

 

[Mark Saunders]

14 minutes ago, phil-b259 said:

However had he succeeded in pushing it through I’m sure he would have got lots of praise from the party faithful for lowering  Government spending which they have been told is a pre-requisite for tax cuts….

 

Meanwhile for normal tax payers it will be one guinea in the pound...

[lmsforever]

Thank goodness for once the people have stopped something that the government tried to push through that would have caused big problems to many people and have caused a drop in passengers.The government now in power seems to have a disregard to rail and to a certain degree road ,as for the DFT I am at a complete loss as to what they think they are actually doing  they show a disregard as to actually bringing benefits to the public.  Transport in the UK needs to be completely overhauled with more power to local people to ensure that we get a proper chance to discuss local needs and not be passed into the woods as now.  In Aylesbury we urgently require a proper bypass but the powers that be have consistently stopped its construction.Luckily we have an excellent railway system in place with good bus links ,reading comments elsewhere we are lucky.At the moment the alternative to the current party in charge do not seem interested in railways or anything else so the future is not good

[phil-b259]

40 minutes ago, lmsforever said:

At the moment the alternative to the current party in charge do not seem interested in railways or anything else so the future is not good public. 

There is one thing they are interested in - saving their own skin when they actually have to face the public at the polls.

 

Virtually everything coming from out from the Government is populist short term it’s claptrap designed to distract people from (or get them good headlines in right wing papers / on GB News) their poor long term record….

Edited November 5, 2023 by phil-b259

[C126]

1 hour ago, SHMD said:

... The removal of Disabled Ramps?! ...

 

This is an excellent parallel in my opinion, which I hope you will let me nick in a letter to the local rag when necessary.

 

[Nick C]

4 hours ago, The Stationmaster said:

Something which a lpt of people don't know about or understand is teh difficulty and insecurity many people - of all ages - encounter when trying to  cope with a travel environment which is outside their personal control.  It doesn't just affect the railway but airports are a major example and in every case what the intending user of the place wants is reassurance from a competent human being.

 

I suspect our local booking office probably  has almost as many people asking questions as there are tickets issued (because many of those buying tickets also ask questions),  They want a knowledgeable and helpful person to reassure them and guide them on their way.   Many of the questions I have heard people ask in recent times could be answered in a a matter of seconds if you put the right question into a search engine.  But lots of people don't know what is the right question to ask although they know the answer they need.  That is the value of a competent human at a booking office window because they can get to the answer even if the initial question iw not quite right - machines can't always do that.

Of course the trouble being that such knowledge and helpfulness doesn't show up on the balance sheet - they only look at money in vs money out...

[Dagworth]

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/nov/05/the-guardian-view-on-englands-train-stations-make-them-part-of-a-rail-renaissance

[MidlandRed]

8 hours ago, The Stationmaster said:

Something which a lpt of people don't know about or understand is teh difficulty and insecurity many people - of all ages - encounter when trying to  cope with a travel environment which is outside their personal control.  It doesn't just affect the railway but airports are a major example and in every case what the intending user of the place wants is reassurance from a competent human being.

I count myself as reasonably tech literate but I have fallen heavily into this category, attempting to use a Chiltern Trains ticket machine at B’ham Moor Street. Out the window went my three trains and one tube itinerary (which had worked precisely until this last step to Kidderminster) as my cluelessness, combined with the similarly dumbfounded person before me resulted in missing the connection. At least there was another one along quite soon - but imagine the angst created if the next was an hour or more away! I realise now I should have gone to the ticket office!! One of the built in issues with the machine was it wouldn’t let me buy a ticket for a train it considered was too close to departure time - by the time I learned to fool it by selecting a later train, it was too late 🤣

[Mike_Walker]

I've heard a lot of criticism of Chiltern's TVMs.  They appear to be particularly poor. 

[Reorte]

On 04/11/2023 at 03:09, jjb1970 said:

In some ways I think the whole argument may miss a bigger picture. There's an assumption which is so deeply ingrained it is never challenged that reducing headcount is a good thing (unless you're the head being reduced). We're rapidly approaching a point where human beings will be obsolete in economic terms as everything beyond the most menial tasks will be able to be done better by automated processes and software...

Completely agree - the only issue I have is with "better." Humans seem to be able to do those jobs well enough, so I regard "better" as rather superfluous anyway. It's really all about "cheaper." I'm firmly of the opinion that we're well past the point of optimum automation (need some, otherwise we're talking about returning to pre-industrial levels of manual work), and that replacing human beings in any job is fundamentally counterproductive, unless those jobs are too dangerous or unpleasant for anyone to really want to do them.

 

There's also quite an irony in how the news reports a business failing as a disaster for the jobs lost (rightly so), cheers on a new business providing jobs, yet keeps telling us how all this modernisation is a great thing. And wanting to marginalise ourselves from every aspect of our lives is plain weird.

[The Stationmaster]

22 hours ago, C126 said:

 

This is an excellent parallel in my opinion, which I hope you will let me nick in a letter to the local rag when necessary.

 

The interesting thing about these is that I've notcied of late that these ramps seem to ebe breeding on our part of the GWR network (and elsewhere to some extent).  This seem to be because different types of train not only can't couple to each other but also need different pattern wheelchair ramps as well despite being constructed to the same loading gauge and kinematic envelope.

 

3 hours ago, Reorte said:

Completely agree - the only issue I have is with "better." Humans seem to be able to do those jobs well enough, so I regard "better" as rather superfluous anyway. It's really all about "cheaper." I'm firmly of the opinion that we're well past the point of optimum automation (need some, otherwise we're talking about returning to pre-industrial levels of manual work), and that replacing human beings in any job is fundamentally counterproductive, unless those jobs are too dangerous or unpleasant for anyone to really want to do them.

 

There's also quite an irony in how the news reports a business failing as a disaster for the jobs lost (rightly so), cheers on a new business providing jobs, yet keeps telling us how all this modernisation is a great thing. And wanting to marginalise ourselves from every aspect of our lives is plain weird.

As someone who spent various parts of my railway career keeping more than an eye on costs and my budget plus having to make savings (which usually meant removing posts) there's a lot more to it than that.  Even in BR days there was tremendous pressure from The Treasury to reduce costs and one of the cheapest ways of doing it was to cut jobs.  But also we were looking for greater efficiency where we could find it and ideally combined with actually improving things.

 

So at the very start of the 1990s I decided that we needed to shorten timescales in our timetabling process - where everything worked on an 8 week cycle to match the needs of flexible rostering calculations for Drivers although it also had massive commercial advantages for freight (my field at that time).  So cut out out our external printer's bill by abolishing printed timetables  and supplements from that source.  We simply set them up internally and they were printed internally but in greatly reduced numbers.  I abolished supplements totally and we simply reissued our timetables once every 8 weeks - which could be encompassed in normal working hours without theh overtime required to get stuff to/from the printer only to see it go out of date in a couple of months.  I also totally changed theh areas our WTTs covered which cost us no extra work but reduced overtime in all the signal boxes that received our WTTs as they no longer had to amend things every 8 weeks.  The change also enabled us to reduce our production timescales so we could often get a new service from specification to fully documented and issued in the next 8 week WTT in as little as a bit less than 3 weeks.

 

But at the same time I cut out one or two posts almost every year fully supported by my team.  This went easily because the first thing I did when starting to put together my budget for the coming year was get the team together and ask who wanted to be made redundant in the coming year?  Not always easy to meet demand unfortunately but we usually managed a happy compromise about who would go,  However a lot of this had to be 'subsidised' by cutting out work and that is something you should never forget if you have a fairly efficient organisation - you can only save posts by ceasing to do certain things.

 

After we went over to the sectorised organisation in 1992 I was given what amounted to a 'steady state' budget which I had little to do with writing.  For 1993 I prepared my own budget - in detail - much to the amazement of our operations admin manager in York who normally did the budget detail  I saved £1 million largely bought-in services from other businesses but including a redundancy in one of my offices and adding several new posts at my other office.  My section of the budget meeting consisted of me tabling my budget. covering in detail all 13 of the 4 weekly periods; the admin manager looking at it and breathing a sigh of relief for the work I'd saved him; my boss asking if what I had tabled was achievable which I confirmed.  And me then sitting back waiting for lunch while my two opposite numbers from elsewhere presented their budget proposals (and one of them being taken aside and asked why he hadn't done anything at all - he had to stay somewhat later than the other two of us).

 

That should be how budgets are down - bottom up, albeit probably with a top down target for savings etc - because The Treasury always wanted savings.  What is happening today appears in many respects to be the exact opposite with DafT micro-mismanagemnt promulgating trivial detail with no heed of the consequences.   Culling booking offices is I suspect no more than a minor part of that mismanagement and iinterference.

[Mark Saunders]

It is well known we are doing more with less so eventually, we will be able to do everything with nothing!

[figworthy]

13 hours ago, Mike_Walker said:

I've heard a lot of criticism of Chiltern's TVMs.  They appear to be particularly poor. 

 

The only TVMs I've used have been the Chiltern ones, and the touch screens don't seem to work very well.  I regularly have to tap it several times before it does what I want (e.g. ticket type, rail card type).  The annoying part of it is that I could buy the tickets I want from a real person two or three paces from the machine, but I can't pay them for the car park, so I've got to use the machine.

 

Adrian

[Hal Nail]

On 05/11/2023 at 12:53, SHMD said:

tourists

Every cloud...

 

[John M Upton]

A lot of TVM's these days seem to be over engineered and clearly designed by a committee who never actually uses the things in real life.  The first NSE ones were better, press button next to station you wanted to go to, press button for single or return, hand over money.  If station not listed, go and see one of the nice people in the ticket office or stick ten pence in the Permit to Travel machine (a car park ticket machine painted red basically) and cross your fingers...

 

I swear the running of the country is gradually being taken over by the occupants of the Golgafrincham B Ark...

Edited November 7, 2023 by John M Upton

[rodent279]

Would a simpler ticketing system/fares structure be a help in the more widespread adoption of TVMs?

[Mark Saunders]

18 hours ago, figworthy said:

 

The only TVMs I've used have been the Chiltern ones, and the touch screens don't seem to work very well. 

I fear that I could starve in a McDonalds as almost every time I try use a touch screen it gives up before getting half way through an order!

[Forward!]

I do almost all my (frequent) train travel for work- so for me rail travel is a case of exercising the company credit card. It would be a rare situation where I wouldn't use an app to book a ticket. I'll always take the quickest, most convenient route and mostly the cost doesn't even factor into it. If plans change, or there's a disruption, I know enough about the network to know how to improvise. It's easy enough when you're on an anytime-any-route-permitted ticket!

 

But recently I needed to cover a long distance by train at short notice using *horror* my own money! A bit of advice from the staff at the local station booking office saved me almost £70 while incurring only the very slightest (almost inconsequential) addition to my journey time.

 

Maybe, one day, AI will be perfectly capable of assisting me in this way, but can anyone really conceive of a train company designing an AI that will be 'motivated' by finding ways to save you money rather than extract from you the most that is possible? One of the few remaining good things about the railways is that I have found, on the occasions when you need them, it is largely still staffed by people who hold genuine knowledge of the network (or their part of it) and are very willing to advise me on the best solution to a potentially complex journey- a solution that is in my best interests, not the company's.

 

I don't care whether these people sit behind a counter or roam a concourse, but the railway needs them.

[John M Upton]

1 hour ago, rodent279 said:

Would a simpler ticketing system/fares structure be a help in the more widespread adoption of TVMs?

 

It does and indeed there have been at least two supposed simplification schemes launched during my sixteen years working on the railway, each time instead of simplifying tickets, just seemed to make the system even more complicated.

 

Example, Gatwick Airport to London (insert terminal of preferred choice here) where all you need are at most half a dozen tickets, single, return, off peak or peak, period return and a London Travelcard (until that idiot Mayor scraps them that is).  Last time I checked there were over fifty different tickets depending on preferred operator (as if a overseas visitor could even tell the difference between Thameslink, Southern and Gatwick Express, to most a train is a train is a train)  whether there is an R in the month and which London Terminal (or if you forget to get off, Luton) you hope your train goes somewhere near.

 

Ironically, there are different fares for Thameslink, Gatwick Express and Southern trains yet they are all operated by the same company and on occasion, the GatEx and Southern stock work each others services!!!

[figworthy]

2 hours ago, Mark Saunders said:

I fear that I could starve in a McDonalds as almost every time I try use a touch screen it gives up before getting half way through an order!

 

Had it occurred to you that the machine was secretly trying to do you a favour ?

 

Adrian

[Nick C]

58 minutes ago, John M Upton said:

a London Travelcard (until that idiot Mayor scraps them that is). 

That too is of course being imposed by the DfT and blamed on the Mayor...

[rodent279]

2 hours ago, Mark Saunders said:

I fear that I could starve in a McDonalds as almost every time I try use a touch screen it gives up before getting half way through an order!

I should count your blessings if I were you....