can anyone suggest a secure system for the scenario I posed earlier: a family member is seriously ill in hospital, and I want my son back quickly from Winchester; he, as a student, has no money. I have access to the internet, but cannot get to a station to arrange a "person travelling without a ticket" whatever that system is. How do i arrange for someone 200 miles away to pick up the ticket
The railway have a system with the acronym SILK in place. I don't know the full details, but that deals with payment being made at a different booking office
Agreed, there is a system. But, on the only occasion I have known this to be used, only open single tickets could be issued, railcard discounts were not available even though a valid railcard was held and was in the possession of the traveller, and the standard £10 administration fee was charged in addition to the open single fare.
Quite a good method of determining the responsiveness of an industry to its customers is to measure how the industry deals with a customer in distress. The formal procedures of the railway industry deal astonishingly badly with a customer in distress.
The most recent such case I had to deal with involved a single mother travelling on an Advance ticket with her one-year-old child from a station south of the Thames to the north of England. She was delayed by weekend closure of the Thameslink route and closure of the Victoria line and therefore missed the train from London to the north. The Thameslink closure was known and advertised in advance. The Victoria line was scheduled to operate that weekend but was closed without significant notice.
The passenger asked for help from a member of staff on the next train from the London terminus to her northern destination. She was sent to the travel centre to have her ticket "validated" for travel on that train. After queueing for a long time, her request was curtly dismissed by the assistant at the travel centre, without any enquiry as to why the connection had been missed. She was told to buy a new ticket, but did not have enough money to do so.
In distress, she sought help by phone. She was advised to queue again, but this time to insist on speaking to a manager. But by this time the next hourly train had been missed. She eventually explained the position to the duty supervisor, who appeared sympathetic and understanding and asked her to wait while options were explored. After forty more minutes, she was told that she had left her suburban station ten minutes too late for the revised advertised connection, so the TOC could not and would not help. She was again told to buy a new ticket. A third train was missed. At no point was she told about the emergency remote ticketing facility. It is not surprising that further distress followed.
Fortunately, two friends who had been expecting to travel with the mother and baby were following (lack of) progress from the train on which all were originally reserved. Even more fortunately, that train had a guard with more than 25 years railway service and many useful contacts, who was able to telephone the TOC's duty manager at the London terminus who arranged for the guard of the fourth hourly train to be advised of the position and for mother and baby to be accommodated in the First Class lounge until the train was prepared for boarding. The baby reached home only half an hour after his normal bedtime.
It was the railways' over-complex systems which were the real cause of these events. Even in retrospect, it has not been possible for me to calculate with precision how many minutes prior to the departure from the London terminus the passenger should have arrived at the suburban station. Every day, many experienced railway staff do excellent work to keep the passengers moving. Too often they do it despite the systems.
John