Leeds - Ticket collection machine platform side

[johntea]

Last night passing through Leeds I noticed Northern have started to install a ticket machine next to the Upper Crust (to the left of the barriers).

It was marked up as a 'Ticket collection' machine so presumably going to be used for passengers picking up their online booked tickets.

I'd be interested to know if it will allow tickets booked via sites such as East Coast to be picked up or just tickets booked on the Northern website.

 

[howittpie]

I know at Stockport that you collect pre booked tickets from any machine whether Virgin or Northern so I would assume it would be the same.

 

[ATW Alex 101]

Nope you can pick any tickets you book online from the Leeds collection only ticket machines. Regardless of the site. Ive picked up tickets booked on EMT atthe VT ticket machine at Lime Street, picked up tickets brought off London Midland at the ATW machine at Chester etc.

All you need is the confirmation number and card you have paid with.

 

[northwichcat]

At Stockport Virgin have put up a notice saying advance Virgin tickets can be collected from the blue Northern machine as well as the Virgin ones. For quite some time Northern didn't offer TOD and a notice previously said the Northern machine only offers tickets for immediate travel.

Northern also have a platform side machine at Piccadilly, on the approach to platforms 13 and 14.

 

[34D]

Inside the barriers? Surely this undermines revenue protection?

 

[yorkie]

Inside the barriers? Surely this undermines revenue protection?

I don't see how?

 

[hairyhandedfool]

I don't see how?

It doesn't really, unless the passenger was not expecting to find ticket barriers in use or they couldn't be bothered to use an open ticket office before boarding, then they could use their web connected phone to buy a short range ticket, wander around a bit, until the system allows collection, and then collect the ticket and exit. Then Northern would be £80 out of pocket, but in a better position to argue about ticket office closures and such.

 

[northwichcat]

There's actually a good reason for putting TVMs platform side.

Say your local station doesn't offer TOD but you hold a season ticket for your local station to Leeds and for a journey you intend to make between your local station and London you have booked a Leeds-London Advance ticket. You can then collect your ticket from a TVM without having to go through the barriers at Leeds twice

 

[edwin_m]

If your local station has no ToD you could in principle also use this to book online from your station to Leeds or elsewhere and collect the ticket on arrival at Leeds. But would you be in trouble if there was a ticket inspection before Leeds?

 

[maniacmartin]

If your local station has no ToD you could in principle also use this to book online from your station to Leeds or elsewhere and collect the ticket on arrival at Leeds. But would you be in trouble if there was a ticket inspection before Leeds?

Yes you would. You need to buy a ticket at the first opportunity.

 

[clagmonster]

It doesn't really, unless the passenger was not expecting to find ticket barriers in use or they couldn't be bothered to use an open ticket office before boarding, then they could use their web connected phone to buy a short range ticket, wander around a bit, until the system allows collection, and then collect the ticket and exit. Then Northern would be £80 out of pocket, but in a better position to argue about ticket office closures and such.

Or if the machine 'sells' tickets, which the vast majority of TVMs do, then just pay the short range fare at the machine (getting a return would meen the RTN portion could be put through the barrier). Hopefully, Northern will do revenue stings to catch out people carrying out this sort of trick. Indeed, maybe the barriers could be set to reject tickets purchased from said machine - is that data on the magnetic strip?

 

[edwin_m]

Or the exit gates could reject a ticket that was sold less than a certain number of minutes previously?

 

[northernman]

Evening all,

The ticket on departure machine has been put there to assist passengers arriving paid side of the gates without having had the opportunity to collect their pre booked tickets before their journey. We found a lot of passengers would struggle when they arrive at Leeds, especially if they have an onward (and tight) connection, hence the machine. We have had one on trial at Harrogate for a year now and have placed 3 at Leeds, the other two are near to KFC in the concourse.

Just to be clear, they are for collection only, they will not sell tickets.

 

[John @ home]

they are for collection only, they will not sell tickets.

Agreed, but the advent of smartphones make that less of a restriction than it used to be.

Today, for example, I bought a couple of rail tickets online at 1456, collected them from one of these 3 new machines at Leeds at 1549 and they were used on the 1610 Leeds - Bristol. The better ticket sites no longer demand a 2-hour wait.

 

[maniacmartin]

Can anyone enlighten us southerners as to what make and model this machine is?

Is it a Parkeon ToDler, as pictured below? If so, you'll all grow to love its speed, unreliability and spellings if it behaves like SWT's ones do

 

[causton]

Can anyone enlighten us southerners as to what make and model this machine is?

Is it a Parkeon ToDler, as pictured below? If so, you'll all grow to love its speed, unreliability and spellings if it behaves like SWT's ones do

If it is, don't bother using it, as the ones at Clapham Junction showed a BIOS error for a while, then a screen saying "this will be in use shortly", then finally it works, but very slowly, I'm sure the normal ticket machines are faster! I only get them for the novelty of the illegible font (especially with reverse text!)

 

[northernman]

The trial machine we have had in use at Harrogate has given us 100% availability and reliability, we are delighted with it!

Its a shame you seem to have had a poor experience with another TOC's machines. It has the quickest ticket printer in any TVM, so also I am not sure what you have experienced elsewhere.

 

[John @ home]

I only get them for the novelty of the illegible font (especially with reverse text!)

My experience yesterday was of very good print qualty and print speed. As I indicated above, the tickets were printed on day of outward travel, so they had no "reverse text".

 

[bb21]

The trial machine we have had in use at Harrogate has given us 100% availability and reliability, we are delighted with it!

Its a shame you seem to have had a poor experience with another TOC's machines. It has the quickest ticket printer in any TVM, so also I am not sure what you have experienced elsewhere.

If it is one of those in the picture above, then the feedback from TOC staff and passengers alike is not positive generally speaking. The biggest gripe with them is that they are highly unreliable, and break down without warning and/or any indication of what went wrong in many cases.

You might have been lucky with the ones you have, but I have heard a lot of TOC staff moaning about them, both on and off the forum.

(In addition, I can back up what causton said above about reverse-print texts, due to the slim nature of the font.)

 

[maniacmartin]

I can't comment on the ones EMT and Northern have, but the SWT ones do have a very quick and easy to use interface and do print extremely fast. This is very useful when you have a few ToD codes to print at once.

However, they sometimes just don't work at all. They appear to be fine, you insert your card, remove your when prompted, and then there is an error and you have to start again. After 3 attempts at this, it might work, or it might not.

At London Waterloo, they have banks with many of these machines, and usually if one isn't working then all of them won't work (but the S&B machines will). So maybe it is a network problem with accessing the various databases and down to some part of the infrastructure that's specific to SWT.

 

[edwin_m]

I can't comment on the ones EMT and Northern have, but the SWT ones do have a very quick and easy to use interface and do print extremely fast. This is very useful when you have a few ToD codes to print at once.

However, they sometimes just don't work at all. They appear to be fine, you insert your card, remove your when prompted, and then there is an error and you have to start again. After 3 attempts at this, it might work, or it might not.

At London Waterloo, they have banks with many of these machines, and usually if one isn't working then all of them won't work (but the S&B machines will). So maybe it is a network problem with accessing the various databases and down to some part of the infrastructure that's specific to SWT.

This is also my experience with the EMT ones at Nottingham before they were removed (or made inaccessible) by the renovation work. Failure rate was around 50% so I quite quickly decided just to head for the normal ticket machines.

 

[Crossover]

Can anyone enlighten us southerners as to what make and model this machine is?

Is it a Parkeon ToDler, as pictured below? If so, you'll all grow to love its speed, unreliability and spellings if it behaves like SWT's ones do

I believe it may be - since it has been mentioned above that Harrogate station has one of the same, I know from posting about it on another thread, that Harrogate has a Parkeon ToDler, so it stands to reason that the new ones at Leeds also are

I think I need to pay a visit to Leeds to collect pre-bought tickets

 

[johntea]

What I do find annoying (On East Coast machines anyway) is you put in your card for security purposes then they ask for your reservation code which can be a real pain if you've forgotten to write it down or have multiple journeys to collect.

It would be easier if it just asked for your postcode or something, or not bother at all! (I don't think a criminal would be rushing to collect some railway tickets if they nicked your card!)

 

[northwichcat]

What I do find annoying (On East Coast machines anyway) is you put in your card for security purposes then they ask for your reservation code which can be a real pain if you've forgotten to write it down or have multiple journeys to collect.

It would be easier if it just asked for your postcode or something, or not bother at all! (I don't think a criminal would be rushing to collect some railway tickets if they nicked your card!)

Well if you have a scrap of paper in your wallet with what looks like a ticket reservation number then a thief is probably more likely to go a TVM than if you have a driving licence in there containing your post code.

Going to a TVM monitored by CCTV and inserting a stolen card on the off-chance of there being tickets available for collection associated with it would be a bit of a stupid thing for a thief to do.

 

[Deerfold]

What I do find annoying (On East Coast machines anyway) is you put in your card for security purposes then they ask for your reservation code which can be a real pain if you've forgotten to write it down or have multiple journeys to collect.

It would be easier if it just asked for your postcode or something, or not bother at all! (I don't think a criminal would be rushing to collect some railway tickets if they nicked your card!)

However if you've multiple bookings to pick up and don't want them all at once it'd be less useful.

Is it really that hard to have a ticket reference written down (or saved as a draft in your phone) - if I decide to pick up a ticket on a whim I can even log into the east coast site on my phone to check the booking reference.

It'd also be fairly insecure if your card was stolen and the booking changed to accept any card - and many business accounts are set like this as a default. If you can put in any card and you and your neighbour have both booked tickets would you want yours coming up when they put their card in?

 

[NewForest]

A related observation about ticket collection (sorry if this is drifting away from the original question):

About a year ago, the RedSpottedHanky call centre told me that ANY bank card would trigger ANY machine at ANY station to request the ticket collection code (TGBEMGWW etc)! I tested this later and confirmed that it did indeed work with a different card and at a different station. So all that guff about the bank card link stated on all the booking sites would appear to be untrue and is an illusion to make us think it's more secure than it really is!

So all you need to remember when going to the station is the ticket collection code; ANY bank card will do. But that does mean that those eight-digit codes are potentially more valuable than they might appear if they're NOT linked to any specific card or station.

Given that the station name dropdown menu on the online order form is also a non-functioning illusion (all it appears to do is to check there's a machine at your desired station and to print the station name on your receipt) the true security level surrounding ticket collection appears pretty low. This misleading illusion of security irritates me, when they should be telling us something like "your ticket code is highly valuable: guard it like your PIN code and DON'T keep it with your bank cards".

~~~~~

By the way: could someone briefly summarise for this Newbie what all those abbreviations relating to ticket machines stand for? Some are obvious but some still mystify me. Or if there's a list of abbreviations elsewhere on this forum, kindly point me in the right direction!

 

[bb21]

TOC - Train Operating Company
EMT - East Midlands Trains
SWT - South West Trains
ATW - Arriva Trains Wales
TVM - Ticket Vending Machine
TOD - Ticket On Departure (i.e. the mechanism where you collect from a TVM)
ToDler - A Parkeon-produced TVM (pictured in Post 15)

If there is any I have missed, feel free to ask.

 

[northwichcat]

Given that the station name dropdown menu on the online order form is also a non-functioning illusion (all it appears to do is to check there's a machine at your desired station and to print the station name on your receipt) the true security level surrounding ticket collection appears pretty low.

Before Huddersfield had TVM (introduced by First TPE) people frequently turned up there asking about how they could collect tickets they had booked through GNER's or the Trainline's site for collection at the station. So the station drop down was a needed addition so people don't wrongly assume that their station has TOD available.

 

[Deerfold]

A related observation about ticket collection (sorry if this is drifting away from the original question):

About a year ago, the RedSpottedHanky call centre told me that ANY bank card would trigger ANY machine at ANY station to request the ticket collection code (TGBEMGWW etc)! I tested this later and confirmed that it did indeed work with a different card and at a different station. So all that guff about the bank card link stated on all the booking sites would appear to be untrue and is an illusion to make us think it's more secure than it really is!

So all you need to remember when going to the station is the ticket collection code; ANY bank card will do. But that does mean that those eight-digit codes are potentially more valuable than they might appear if they're NOT linked to any specific card or station.

Given that the station name dropdown menu on the online order form is also a non-functioning illusion (all it appears to do is to check there's a machine at your desired station and to print the station name on your receipt) the true security level surrounding ticket collection appears pretty low. This misleading illusion of security irritates me, when they should be telling us something like "your ticket code is highly valuable: guard it like your PIN code and DON'T keep it with your bank cards".

~~~~~

The TOCs can set the system for any given booking to either require ANY card or a specific card. I've had both these situations happen:

Put in a wrong card so not been able to get my ticket until I put in the right one.
Collected a ticket for business travel for my wife by putting in my card.

I would suggest the value of the code is the same value as the tickets it's for.

 

[sheff1]

This is also my experience with the EMT ones at Nottingham before they were removed (or made inaccessible) by the renovation work. Failure rate was around 50% so I quite quickly decided just to head for the normal ticket machines.

Same here at Sheffield. When they were first introduced I thought the much faster printing was a good reason to use them. I soon found the high failure rate negated any benefit and never go near them any more.