Stopped by revenue officers after leaving train

[Howardh]

The TOC will likely just point to the fact that it was during ticket office opening times.

But that doesn't mean there's someone there to sell you a ticket. If it's one bloke and he's on the toilet, and your train's approaching? It's happened to me at Bolton (dunno if he's on the bog or behind the scenes doing something important) several times in the past.

I know if you go into a shop, it's open but there's no-one to serve you you can't just help yourself, but how would a judge feel if you had to catch that particular train to get the connection to the next, otherwise it's a night in a hotel, but the ticket collector wasn't there??

 

[island]

It's your word against the TOC's in instances like that.

 

[Deerfold]

No, your quote says 'headed for the station exit'. From P1/2 most people doing this will pass a manual barrier just before it on the overbridge. The OP has said it was a Northern train, very few of these arrive at other platforms. It all sounds pretty straightforward to me.

No, they said "I headed to the exit...where..." which reads as them having reached it by the time the rest of the events happened.

I double checked they had not written "towards" or "for", but definitely "to".

They may have been inaccurate in their description.

 

[185]

Like I said, there have not been many pulled for fare evasion on the overbridge, almost all of the TIR-ing seems to be done at the exit of the subway, similar to a Blackburn trap operation.

To stop customers on the overbridge, is intercepting them before they have had the opportunity to reach a booking office - this makes an FTP operation unenforceable.

 

[All Line Rover]

At the very least? I'd expect the failure to serve queuing customers within the time stipulated in a Company's 'Passenger's Charter' to be a lot more persuasive than that! Where the Prosecution turned on the failure to buy before travel, I would expect the Defence to turn on that failure.

It is unfortunate that the TOCs provide so much information that can be misleading to the average passenger.

For example, the EMT ticket office at St Pancras has a large poster outside saying, in large print, "THERE WAS A QUEUE", with directly below that, "NO TICKET, NO EXCUSE. You must always buy a ticket before boarding".

I appreciate that "there was a queue" is one of the most frequent excuses trotted out by fare evaders, but that particular ticket office regularly has queues of almost 30 minutes (as I once had to endure after a TVM failed, with the problem, in the event, still not being resolved!).

Passenger Focus have a helpful webpage on what to do if the ticket office queue is too long (namely, speak to the guard before boarding), and I agree with their advice, but it is unfortunate that some TOCs (such as EMT) publish overly strict information (implying that one is, in theory, obliged to wait many hours if the queue happened to be that long) whilst others (such as Virgin) publish overly lax information (which, whilst theoretically correct, implies that it is always acceptable to walk past ticket purchasing facilities and buy tickets on board).