How many of the declined cards are due to wropy signal?
I'd say "loads" - if you're on a fast-moving train in a rural area, forget cards, including quite a few which used to work perfectly well "offline" with just a PIN on Avantix!
It isn't a backward step because it shouldn't be done in the first place and has never been allowed. Any guard doing it is breaching the rules by "being helpful". The amount of people who say "but the guard excessed me last week" is irritating. If you can't remember your railcard, you shouldn't buy the discount, if you've genuinely done it once as a lapse of memory all TOCs will now refund the price of a full ticket as if you'd travelled with your railcard. So there's really no argument against a new ticket unless you don't hold a valid railcard anymore.
Not quite true. Official rules and training at a number of TOCs permitted excesses from Railcard to non-Railcard tickets for many years. Back when I was trained, the process for times when fraud wasn't suspected was: explain -> excess if ticket could be excessed (ie. not Travelcards) -> take difference in payment -> confiscate Railcard if presented but out of date. Then issue a PF warning ticket if needed.
I've had one card decline three times but I suspected that was down to signal strength, I went back 5mins later and it went through. Previously I'd have forced acceptance on the Thyron which would have resulted in the company getting a charge back of £30.
Depends if the signature was presented and whether the card was marked as electronic use only. If a signature was present on both user and retailer receipts, and the card was not labelled as being invalid offline, my understanding was that a chargeback was quite hard, especially if challenged by the TOC.
And I used to do one hell of a lot of these things! Double figures each day if I was unlucky.
I'm getting quite used to it now. The weak link is still the printer, jams, runs out of tickets with no warning and there is no red stripe, but mainly jams and half prints.
Sounds like your depot is getting dud batches of tickets for whatever reason. No problems reported to me on the rest of your TOC! Red stripes are perfectly prevalent on tickets issued at depots further north.
It seems being bashed around as you walk through the train does not make it a happy bunny. I've had a printer fail right at the start of the day (first train) and never getting back to base, I was turning down tickets left right and centre, including a nice Seaford to Rochester, SVR, via London. We can sell 80 tickets per shift, so this is a loss to us. I'm sick of hearing the grinding noise when the ticket is trying to print.
Try a smaller stack of tickets (don't ever cram the compartment like you could with Avantix!), insert the first into the slot as per the label, close the lid and run through the menus till you get to "Dither ticket". Select that and it should do a test print across the whole surface area of the ticket. Try that!
Other issues. Lack of hands. We use a big tablet, so you have in your hand, a big tablet, then the credit card bit, and trying to tear a ticket off, aghhhhh.
Yep, and what with the tablet not fitting into the strap...!
And some excesses. The other day a punter wanted to extend their return trip back to Clapham Junction rather than East Croydon. So set the original trip, excess, return, but then it would only allow the original destination to be changed, in this case Falmer. I'd run out of time (only had mins), so nothing could be done. Had a practice later and changed the destination to Clapham, and a zero fare ticket printed, Clapham to East Croydon. No good. Kept playing around and a few prints later got a ticket to print that said East Croydon to Clapham junction. Never got one to say Falmer to Clapham junction which was, what was needed. By then I had logged 7 zero fares.
Right. We were taught that we could over distance on the return leg, thats why it had the options outward and return.
I've played with this and it seems unreliable vice impossible. It certainly wasn't highlighted as no longer being allowed on Southern when I was briefed. Indeed, this has been a staple feature of conductors' lives on the BML for quite some time!
If you can spend a bit of time playing with one in a messroom for yourself, see if you can get it to do it with various combinations of selecting outward/return excesses etc. The outward/return buttons should still be there on screen and there would be no point in these being present for so long if they weren't applicable to over-distance ticketing!
Yeah unfortunately it can no longer be done, but my trainer told me it shouldn't have been allowed in the first place as it was never a permitted reason to excess.
Often an excess of this nature is the only reasonable way of sorting a situation out and I've never heard that from any ticketing trainer before... and I've met a few!
I've not tried an excess like that but I'll give it a go! I had to do a single to return excess earlier and it took me about five attempts as the process is a little bit convoluted.
Now that really shouldn't be allowed - excessing to a different line of route should only be done where permitted routes allow it. In the Surrey and Sussex area, as well as a small bit of Kent, this can be confused because certain seasons are valid on alternative parallel routes, but day tickets and day Travecards are not.
The usual procedure is to issue a new ticket for the diverging route from the last station in common for both. Eg. a day ticket from Clapham Junction-Buxted could be added to with a ticket from East Croydon-Haywards Heath, if Haywards Heath was the final destination. A season, on the other hand, depending on start and end points, may allow use of the alternative route at no extra charge, regardless of "AAA" (Also Available At) markings.
Bought this ticket on-board a Greater Anglia train from a Great Northern RPI (transaction started whilst on the platform and we both intended to take the same train).
System was a tablet computer, very small (tiny) credit card reader and printer. All very impractical as there was too much equipment to hold in two hands. Fitted nicely into a rucksack, but the tablet is clearly too large to slip into a pocket. Since he is a RPI for GN, I assume they rarely sell tickets, but rather take details of fare evaders, in which case the larger tablet could be used to reduce paperwork without needing the other parts of the system.
You're right, the new tablets should be much better for taking details for PFs and MG11s. They can even be used to run a sort of pop-up ticket office, apparently! But they are awkward to carry, especially with the two cases some depots seem to have for them!
Sometimes a printed receipt is still issued for PFs and so on. There are also excesses that RPIs would be required to do without issuing a penalty.
I was very surprised when the ticket was printed on magnetic stock without a barcode, as I had assumed the new system would only print on rolls of paper. Very impressed with the clarity of the font (especially compared to some ticket machines).
The tickets are very clear, though they still don't always work all of the barriers, much to passengers' dismay!
That looks like the ATOS Worldline Envoy system. Its certainly in use on Stagecoach and Govia TOCs, the ticket software I believe can run on any Android based phone. Ours used a Samsung Galaxy S6 which is screwed into a heavy protective case so is much bulkier than my personal S6 (which itself is in a bulky case!).
At GTR it runs on Samsung Active tablets... also on Android.
A small note - as I have received training on it and am not sure how well this has been communicated!
Envoy is not the official name anymore due to trademark issues, it now has the much more catchy name WLMTS
so people may be calling it that, but I think Envoy has stuck a little too much...
Envoy is still a legacy name often given to training and some documentation, but you're right that the hardware and software doesn't seem to have that name anywhere!
