Ah Solo & Electron- the dodgers weapon of choice!
They know the railway can't accept them, "most" know we can't do anything about it.
"Do you take cards mate?"- normally followed by being handed an Electron.
So you give them the lecture that NO- we don't take them- usually something about we don't have the means to go "online" and check with the bank that you have money in your account to pay for the ticket. Stuff about how Solo & Electron aren't the "same" as a debit card, etc.
Then what action do we take?
1) Politely ask if they have another method of payment
2) Do the three fails?-
3) UFN or TIR- at this stage some money or another card comes out!
4) Mate pays for them-
5) Jump off at next station find a cash point-
6) Jump off at next station and go through the SILK procedure-
Always try and make a note of the name on the card and a description! Yeah give them the benefit of the doubt first time around but come across them a second or third time......
The move from SPORTIS to AVB2 brought with it a new set of problems. The method of handling card payments became very time consuming in fact in some cases this has become the new £20 stalling tactic save my workmates sat at the very end of the train type scenario.
You have to carry around a brick mostly in your back trouser pocket. This brick is very unreliable! You have to wait for the thing to wake up and connect. When it finally connects hand brick over to punter to pop in their pin. Punter hands back brick- wait for tickets to print out, wait for brick to print out till receipt, wait for brick to ask do you want an other receipt. Then repeat x times through out carriage, while doing doors and announcements and people taking the huff because you haven't got to them yet.
Thats not to mention error 6!
The time it takes to reset the thing is lengthy. Do you do a "soft" reset or a "hard" reset? Even if you reset it there is a good chance it still won't work. So do you keep ploughing through doing cash fares only? Then someone pipes up that it isn't fair that bloke sat next to them gets away with paying his fare or will have to queue up for ages at the barriers all because you are incompetent and need retraining- because your brick won't work.
Then you have the issue with the bricks not taking cards issued by certain banks (Lloyds TSB being the no1). You have perfectly acceptable means of payment but the machine won't take it which causes embarrassment to the punter and staff.
You have instances where punters have cottoned on to this so they jump on the train everyday now getting a free ride. They refuse a TIR / UFN- saying it is not their fault their card won't work in our bricks. Why should they contact the bank to get a new card, why should they have to get cash out to buy a ticket- they want to pay by card.
We aren't allowed to swipe the cards! Even though by doing this you bypass the problem with the chip and we get the payment and they get a ticket. How many swipes you do is recorded so staff are reluctant to do it and most won't swipe ever because staff have been in trouble for swiping. Yet other TOCs swipe and don't use the brick or the magic 1100. Excuse we get is well we have a contract with merchant services and it must be a chip and pin transaction- don't swipe.
Don't ever punch them in manually this is an even bigger no, no!
You can have as many working party roadshows as you want- but these won't fix the fact that these machines are not up to scratch for the needs of the rail industry. TOCs are losing out on ticket sales, staff are loosing out on 3 or 5%, and the punters are having to put up with a shoddy system.
Only ever had one instance of these "pre-paid" cards and AVB2 won't accept them.
