RailRiders vouchers and PayTrains

[lyndhurst25]

I was planning on posting this in Disputes and Prosecutions but it’s probably a bit late to be claiming compensation after 40 years.

Remember RailRiders? British Rail’s club for kids. Late 1970s / early 1980s. Advertised by The Goodies. You paid to join and in return you got a badge, a regular magazine, some stickers, discounts at places to visit and a book of money-off vouchers for train travel

Remember PayTrains? Local trains where you HAD to pay the guard on board (even if you were travelling from a major station, I think) and you got issued with a little square ticket from what looked like a bus ticket machine. They were commoin the north of England around that time.

Anyway I remember our family trying to use the RailRiders vouchers on PayTrains, on more than one occasion I think, only for the guard to gruffly refuse to take them “only valid at the station”. We ended up with a lot of unused vouchers and didn't rejoin the following year.

Was the guard right to refuse the vouchers or was he just being a jobsworth? Had the London centric BR marketing department not thought through the PayTrain problem when setting up RailRiders?

 

[pdeaves]

I was planning on posting this in Disputes and Prosecutions but it’s probably a bit late to be claiming compensation after 40 years.

Remember RailRiders? British Rail’s club for kids. Late 1970s / early 1980s. Advertised by The Goodies. You paid to join and in return you got a badge, a regular magazine, some stickers, discounts at places to visit and a book of money-off vouchers for train travel

Remember PayTrains? Local trains where you HAD to pay the guard on board (even if you were travelling from a major station, I think) and you got issued with a little square ticket from what looked like a bus ticket machine. They were commoin the north of England around that time.

Anyway I remember our family trying to use the RailRiders vouchers on PayTrains, on more than one occasion I think, only for the guard to gruffly refuse to take them “only valid at the station”. We ended up with a lot of unused vouchers and didn't rejoin the following year.

Was the guard right to refuse the vouchers or was he just being a jobsworth? Had the London centric BR marketing department not thought through the PayTrain problem when setting up RailRiders?

I never had any trouble using vouchers anywhere. Maybe it was more of a 'don't want the faff' thing.

RailRiders was based in York so with a closer affinity to the north than London has.

 

[station_road]

I only ever used mine at the ticket office but have found an image online that includes the text 'Not valid unless exchanged for a ticket before the journey is commenced' so looks like in theory they did have to be used at ticket offices.

http://www.srpublicity.co.uk/brs/corp-images/rr-ticket.JPG

I do remember that you could buy further books of vouchers once they had expired (£2 for £5 worth of vouchers? I think there were 2 x £1 and 6 x50p vouchers in each book)

 

[lyndhurst25]

Thanks.

Yes, based in York, I remember now. It just seemed at the time that kids in the north always seemed to get left out compared to those from down south. Blue Peter was very London centric and how often did Keith Chegwin ever visit somewhere up north for SwapShop - never it felt like.

If the vouchers could only be used at station ticket offices then they was certainly a bit of a downer for us kids that lived near a line served by PayTrains. Didn’t guards accept “adult” Rail Travel Vouchers onboard back then though? If they did then they could have sorted it out for the RailRiders vouchers too.

Today at least you could sell any spare ones on ebay. Ours went in the bin.

 

[pdeaves]

It just seemed at the time that kids in the north always seemed to get left out compared to those from down south.

In the case of RailRiders, the north 'won' more. You got some sort of prize if you saw 47406. That rarely ventured away from the north east, which always seemed unfair to this 'southerner'!

 

[Bald Rick]

I used them on pay trains regularly.

RailRiders was based in York so with a closer affinity to the north than London has.

Wetherby, IIRC, staffed by the lovely Caroline. Wetherby seemed an odd choice to me as a Pre-teen, seeing as there was no railway there!

 

[12LDA28C]

Of course, for those who weren't aware, Rail Riders has been resurrected....

The Home of Rail Riders, The Railway Club for Everyone

We are a general railway club for all ages, offering members discounts on Railway travel and other benefits

www.railriders.club

 

[stuu]

Nothing to do with the vouchers but the mention of RailRiders has brought back memories of being given early access to see the exciting new trains which would be coming to my local line in 1985 (Aberystwyth, Class 150, something of an anticlimax even to a 9 year old)

 

[Springs Branch]

I do remember that you could buy further books of vouchers once they had expired (£2 for £5 worth of vouchers? I think there were 2 x £1 and 6 x50p vouchers in each book)

On first reading this thread, I wondered whether RailRider vouchers not being accepted "out in the field" on PayTrains had anything to do with BR trying to eliminate temptation for low-level fraud by any less-than-honest guards?

(I recall, in the days when it wasn't unusual for a Blakey-style inspector to board your bus and check your ticket, this was much more to do with detecting fiddling by the conductor than a passenger overriding their stop)

In the RailRider case, for example, I imagined a guard (or his mate from down the pub) might take out 3, 4 or more memberships for fictitious children at his address, receive the membership packs and vouchers, then bit-by-bit as he sold child tickets on the train for cash, swap his stash of RailRider vouchers for cash. And once they were all gone, buy another £5-worth for £2.

On reflection, and seeing that @Bald Rick actually did manage to use the vouchers on PayTrains, this is probably not the reason.

- Even at 1970s prices, the gain probably would not be worth the effort, or the risk of losing your job, plus prosecution.
- The scam would be just as applicable to booking office clerks as mobile PayTrain guards.

But it did lead me to wonder what precautions BR took against misuse of the other, more lucrative promotions of that era like Persil tokens, Cornflakes packet vouchers etc.

For example, if you worked in a ticket office without much supervision, and had collected Persil vouchers from your missus, your mother, your sister-in-law and Mrs Miggins across the street, when someone paid cash for a full-price return from Carlisle to Plymouth (other worthwhile tickets are available), what prevented you accounting for that ticket against one of your own Persil vouchers and pocketing the cash received? Was there anything in the redemption method to prevent this happening? Were the promotional rail tickets different to 'regular' tickets?

 

[The exile]

On first reading this thread, I wondered whether RailRider vouchers not being accepted "out in the field" on PayTrains had anything to do with BR trying to eliminate temptation for low-level fraud by any less-than-honest guards?

(I recall, in the days when it wasn't unusual for a Blakey-style inspector to board your bus and check your ticket, this was much more to do with detecting fiddling by the conductor than a passenger overriding their stop)

In the RailRider case, for example, I imagined a guard (or his mate from down the pub) might take out 3, 4 or more memberships for fictitious children at his address, receive the membership packs and vouchers, then bit-by-bit as he sold child tickets on the train for cash, swap his stash of RailRider vouchers for cash. And once they were all gone, buy another £5-worth for £2.

On reflection, and seeing that @Bald Rick actually did manage to use the vouchers on PayTrains, this is probably not the reason.

- Even at 1970s prices, the gain probably would not be worth the effort, or the risk of losing your job, plus prosecution.
- The scam would be just as applicable to booking office clerks as mobile PayTrain guards.

But it did lead me to wonder what precautions BR took against misuse of the other, more lucrative promotions of that era like Persil tokens, Cornflakes packet vouchers etc.

For example, if you worked in a ticket office without much supervision, and had collected Persil vouchers from your missus, your mother, your sister-in-law and Mrs Miggins across the street, when someone paid cash for a full-price return from Carlisle to Plymouth (other worthwhile tickets are available), what prevented you accounting for that ticket against one of your own Persil vouchers and pocketing the cash received? Was there anything in the redemption method to prevent this happening? Were the promotional rail tickets different to 'regular' tickets?

IIRC - some serious fiddle was unearthed “in the Bristol area” involving the vouchers connected with the InterCity 21st birthday, which resulted in suddenly seeing different faces in the booking office!

 

[davetheguard]

I worked several Paytrain routes when I was a Guard at Reading:

Reading - Tonbridge;
Reading - Bedwyn;
Twyford - Henley on Thames;
and later, when Slough depot closed, Maidenhead - Marlow.

Railriders' vouchers were definitely accepted on these routes, and I remember doing so on quite a few occasions!

 

[Wallsendmag]

IIRC - some serious fiddle was unearthed “in the Bristol area” involving the vouchers connected with the InterCity 21st birthday, which resulted in suddenly seeing different faces in the booking office!

Wasn't just Bristol, Newcastle lost some staff too.

 

[55002]

Wasn't just Bristol, Newcastle lost some staff too.

Wasn’t the Persil vouchers open to Similar issues

 

[Taunton]

The original Paytrain concept, first used in East Anglia I think, did only take fares on the train, like a bus, even from stations like Norwich with a booking office. It was intended to make things simple, and also to get actual revenue attribution on the local service, and not lost in the general pool of through tickets. Stations on the initial Paytrain lines did not have fares in the fare manual. Over time this got modified, there were a range of issues with doing this, and possibly it was modified in different ways in different areas - quite likely by different Regions commercial departments.

 

[springtide]

I only ever used mine at the ticket office but have found an image online that includes the text 'Not valid unless exchanged for a ticket before the journey is commenced' so looks like in theory they did have to be used at ticket offices.

http://www.srpublicity.co.uk/brs/corp-images/rr-ticket.JPG

I do remember that you could buy further books of vouchers once they had expired (£2 for £5 worth of vouchers? I think there were 2 x £1 and 6 x50p vouchers in each book)

That brings back some memories! I used to love RailRiders!!

I did find a collection of RailRider pin badges at my mums house a couple of years ago.

 

[Ashley Hill]

I remember walking around stations wearing the red and black mac and carrying the red and black hold-all. Looking back I must have looked a right nit. Still have the badges.
I only ever used my vouchers at a booking office but I expect guards would have accepted them in the same way as travel vouchers.

 

[JKF]

I still have some of the magazines somewhere. Loved the ATP style logo, it was our brave future then.