SWR cracking down on Vauxhall - Waterloo doughnuts/short fares - Also GTR

[jumble]

I wonder if there’s a good case to just stop selling Vauxhall to Waterloo as e-tickets. Anyone definitely wanting to make a real journey between the two stations, (avoiding Oyster or contactless PAYG), could always use a TVM, or TOD - collect at Vauxhall only.

Did the ‘inventors’ of the e-ticket system never realise that they’d designed such a useful enabler for people to short fare? Seems to me nearly every new great idea comes with additional scope for fare dodging.

If you enforce TOD collection only at Vauxhall and the TOD machine and ticket office both refuse to issue the tickets maintaining they are blocked but don't know why then what happens next?

 

[Haywain]

If you enforce TOD collection only at Vauxhall

It isn't possible to do that.

 

[Sidmouth34010]

I'm often curious what drives the behaviour to fare-avoid (as opposed to all the excuses given). The thrill / the bravado of committing a minor crime? Peer-pressure?

I think there is a sense of entitlement and an act of rebellion against what is seen as state (in which many have now lost trust) or big business (which is seen to care about profits) plus the cost of rail travel . Probably feels like a small victory for so many who feel no one cares for anymore. Equally when you remove the on train TTI's and move people to apps, ticket machines , remove human connection , people then find a way to push the boundary

road closed near me last night and both ends fenced off . someone had moved two substantial fences to allow a vehicle through and left them so of course so many not wishing the inconvenience of a detour carried on through. It was actually quite dangerous with a deep fenced excavation on one side. but someones convenience became more important than safety

appreciate above is an off topic analogy but it exhibits how quickly one persons dodge becomes endemic behaviour

 

[Starmill]

Did the ‘inventors’ of the e-ticket system never realise that they’d designed such a useful enabler for people to short fare? Seems to me nearly every new great idea comes with additional scope for fare dodging.

They needed only to read the debates about it on the forum 10 years ago to have had the obvious pointed out to them.

If you enforce TOD collection only at Vauxhall and the TOD machine and ticket office both refuse to issue the tickets maintaining they are blocked but don't know why then what happens next?

Even if you could do this (you can't), and even with no eticket fulfilment (as is already the case), this still only works in the up direction. It doesn't do anything to tackle people going the other way...

The actual answer is to do more ticket checking on the train.

My thoughts exactly, a very easy one to set a trap for, especially on the mainline side of the station…

Helpfully for SWR, a large number of the people trying it on like this are not very bright. They have been catching people coming off trains that didn't even stop at Vauxhall en masse since at least 2023. I guess this is a natural expansion of that.

Still, what worries me is this. There must be a far smaller, but still above zero, number of people who are conducting much cleverer fraud. If SWR are really making big gains, as they say, and all they've done is block trains that didn't call at Vauxhall, send threatening letters and remove eticket fulfilment, and even these basic measures have taken them years to put into place, that suggests that a lot of their resources are being tied up dealing with the easiest to solve fraud against them.

This rather suggests that someone with even a basic intelligence trying it on could well have been doing so for years completely undetected. For obvious reasons I won't be going into any further detail as to how to defeat their revenue protection.

 

[Haywain]

I think there is a sense of entitlement and an act of rebellion against what is seen as state (in which many have now lost trust) or big business (which is seen to care about profits) plus the cost of rail travel . Probably feels like a small victory for so many who feel no one cares for anymore. Equally when you remove the on train TTI's and move people to apps, ticket machines , remove human connection , people then find a way to push the boundary

You are overthinking it. People just see a way to save a few pounds and seem to have an attitude that if it's a big corporation or the state that's losing out then there's no real victim and see a small win for themselves. It's not just about train fares, it happens in all sorts of ways, whether it's doing work for cash on hand to beat the taxman or being 'clever' with the self-service tills at supermarkets or whatever else.

 

[D1537]

And I'm sure Northern have done something similar in the past, withdrawing selected e-tickets for known short fare hotspots where the trains are too busy for effective revenue protection (i.e. Harrogate line) or are run with a pair of non gangway units (popular with the "Front Unit Aimers").

Scotrail did it with Edinburgh-Haymarket as well.

 

[hwl]

They needed only to read the debates about it on the forum 10 years ago to have had the obvious pointed out to them.

Even if you could do this (you can't), and even with no eticket fulfilment (as is already the case), this still only works in the up direction. It doesn't do anything to tackle people going the other way...

The actual answer is to do more ticket checking on the train.

Helpfully for SWR, a large number of the people trying it on like this are not very bright. They have been catching people coming off trains that didn't even stop at Vauxhall en masse since at least 2023. I guess this is a natural expansion of that.

Still, what worries me is this. There must be a far smaller, but still above zero, number of people who are conducting much cleverer fraud. If SWR are really making big gains, as they say, and all they've done is block trains that didn't call at Vauxhall, send threatening letters and remove eticket fulfilment, and even these basic measures have taken them years to put into place, that suggests that a lot of their resources are being tied up dealing with the easiest to solve fraud against them.

This rather suggests that someone with even a basic intelligence trying it on could well have been doing so for years completely undetected. For obvious reasons I won't be going into any further detail as to how to defeat their revenue protection.

A huge part of the problem is Tr**nl*n* but putting that genie back in the bottle will be difficult as they will scream until there are public stats on how much they have cost the industry.
Another huge problems was lack of competence at RDG.

Interestingly this morning a very interesting newsletter email dropped in my inbox (from a very reliable industry organisation):

A major train operator has launched a considerable crackdown on passengers deliberately purchasing tickets for only a portion of their journey, typically the ending stretch, a practice known as ‘short-faring’.

South Western Railway (SWR) identified widespread misuse of electronic tickets by individuals engaged in this form of fare evasion – with 153 short-faring offences detected compared to seven during the same period last year.

The operator found that up to 95% of barcode tickets purchased for the four-minute route between Vauxhall and London Waterloo were being used fraudulently. These cheaper tickets, valid for the short Vauxhall to Waterloo journey, are often used to open barriers at London Waterloo, despite passengers having travelled from much further afield on SWR’s network, which extends to Devon and Dorset.
This fare-dodging is putting an estimated £1 million of SWR revenue at risk. In response, the company has deployed additional revenue protection staff at Vauxhall to ensure that all electronic tickets are scanned upon entry to the station. This measure allows staff at London Waterloo to identify fare dodgers, as an unscanned electronic ticket from Vauxhall suggests that the passenger has travelled from a further location.

Any passengers caught without the correct train ticket must pay a Penalty Fare of £100 and buy a single ticket for their journey. Those found to be repeat offenders can face prosecution.
Early data suggests about a third of passengers previously identified by SWR as conducting the short-faring scam are now purchasing the correct ticket for their journey.

Matthew Winnie, SWR and Network Rail Wessex Chief Customer and Commercial Officer, said that they are tackling the less visible forms of fare fraud, including short-faring and misuse of e-tickets, in order to ensure that money is not taken away from reinvesting into the railway.

Industry body, the Rail Delivery Group, estimates that at least £350 million to £400 million of annual fares revenue is lost to fraud and ticketless travel each year. SWR, which revealed that all forms of fare evasion cost it about £40 million annually, said it has cut the practice by 67 per cent since 2017.

Given that SWR reckon the fraud on their patch is currently £40m pa (10% of national estimate) having been reduced from ~£120m in 2017 and Vauxhall short ticketing fraud at £1m pa alone, do the current SWR or national fraud estimates stack up or are they very conservative?

 

[Haywain]

A huge part of the problem is Tr**nl*n*

In what way are Trainline "a huge part of the problem"? They are just one of many retailers.

 

[SuspectUsual]

Being cynical, I’d say that playing the anxiety card is more a case of trying it on hoping to get a more favourable outcome when caught.

Someone with genuine anxiety surely seeks to avoid stressful situations so would buy the right ticket to avoid the situation of being stopped and questioned.

As per my previous post, anxiety manifests itself in many different ways. Personally, my greatest anxiety is something unexpected happening to me, so I’m overly cautious and plan, replan, plan again etc etc. But as I said, I know from work I’ve done with physiologists and therapists that for other people it will be different.

That said, are some of the people we see “playing the mental health card”? Almost certainly, statistically. Which ones? I’ve often got no idea, so I try and give everyone the benefit of the (sometimes considerable) doubt. (There are a few who mention mental health and then go very quiet when told they’d need to evidence it was pre-existing, so perhaps you can draw conclusions from that)

 

[Starmill]

A huge part of the problem is Tr**nl*n* but putting that genie back in the bottle will be difficult as they will scream until there are public stats on how much they have cost the industry.

I'm fairly sure that's just availability bias. There are more problems because there are more sales.

 

[hwl]

In what way are Trainline "a huge part of the problem"? They are just one of many retailers.

They opened up the market and are by far the biggest. From my observations of what other passengers are doing when I occasionally use of SWR long distance services it also seem to be the ticketting app of choice used by donutters (yes they really do this is full view of good chunk of the carriage and the app has big text so other people can see you being naughty!). It gets quite entertaining when you get on and end up sitting next to a non-uniform team who are also watching what is going on while waiting for the long gap north of Winchester (with a poor phone signal so they can't suddenly buy extra ticketsl) for everything to settle down before pouncing. A decent phone signal down the SWML could also be bad of ticketing revenue.
Without going into too much detail having decentralised multiple retailers is key part of enabling donutting with e-tickets less traceable. Systematically cutting e-ticket donutting will require substantial changes to ticket retailing.

== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: 6 Aug 2026 ==

I'm fairly sure that's just availability bias. There are more problems because there are more sales.

Indeed but they are also profiting the most from enabling fraud.

 

[wilbers]

There's no mechanism in industry systems to force you to collect a ticket at a particular station.

Don't the tickets have something on them to indicate which station they were printed at? So if its a station 30 miles away, printed few minutes minutes before a train from there into Waterloo it would become rather obvious.

 

[43096]

Without going into too much detail having decentralised multiple retailers is key part of enabling donutting with e-tickets less traceable. Systematically cutting e-ticket donutting will require substantial changes to ticket retailing.

e-tickets are rather more traceable than going to a station ticket machine and paying cash for a Vauxhall-Waterloo ticket.

 

[AlterEgo]

Without going into too much detail having decentralised multiple retailers is key part of enabling donutting with e-tickets less traceable.

How are they less traceable?

 

[mrmartin]

Being cynical, I’d say that playing the anxiety card is more a case of trying it on hoping to get a more favourable outcome when caught.

Someone with genuine anxiety surely seeks to avoid stressful situations so would buy the right ticket to avoid the situation of being stopped and questioned.

Keep in mind there is a huge selection bias going on here. It's very likely that only anxious fare avoiders bother posting on here. If you weren't you would probably put the letter in the bin and not think twice about it, not go to considerable effort to find this forum, make an account and post about it. Theres no doubt a huge amount of people that don't think twice about it until they get bailiffs at the door or similar.

 

[Starmill]

Systematically cutting e-ticket donutting will require substantial changes to ticket retailing.

But the problem isn't the retailer. We've discussed this at some length. The actual problem is a lack of ticket checking.

 

[Watershed]

Don't the tickets have something on them to indicate which station they were printed at? So if its a station 30 miles away, printed few minutes minutes before a train from there into Waterloo it would become rather obvious.

They do. Of course a well organised evader wouldn't be printing their ticket just before they get on the train...

 

[35B]

Given that SWR reckon the fraud on their patch is currently £40m pa (10% of national estimate) having been reduced from ~£120m in 2017 and Vauxhall short ticketing fraud at £1m pa alone, do the current SWR or national fraud estimates stack up or are they very conservative?

I've no idea. But I suspect online ticket sales are making usage patterns (and hence lost revenue) more visible, along with the key locations involved.

 

[Haywain]

Indeed but they are also profiting the most from enabling fraud.

They profit from selling more tickets than any other retailer, but we also know they are more proactive than others in assisting TOCs in detecting fraud.

 

[superkopite]

Indeed but they are also profiting the most from enabling fraud.

What fraud is it that Trainline specifically enable?

 

[SuspectUsual]

Keep in mind there is a huge selection bias going on here. It's very likely that only anxious fare avoiders bother posting on here. If you weren't you would probably put the letter in the bin and not think twice about it, not go to considerable effort to find this forum, make an account and post about it. Theres no doubt a huge amount of people that don't think twice about it until they get bailiffs at the door or similar.

Don’t agree with that at all. I think a lot of the people we see are shocked to discover they’ve done something illegal and are panicking once the law are involved.

I’d say a significant majority of the people on here are not suffering from clinical anxiety, but are anxious at what they think might be about to happen to them.

That’s two different things

 

[Tetchytyke]

They do. Of course a well organised evader wouldn't be printing their ticket just before they get on the train...

Indeed not, but if you're collecting short hop tickets days in advance then that's a massive red flag too.

They opened up the market and are by far the biggest.

That doesn't mean that they are enabling fraud. Indeed, it seems to be the opposite: they appear to be far more compliant with TOC data requests than other retailers are.

Trainline can only sell what the industry allows them to sell. If the industry doesn't want e-tickets and mobile retailing then it is easy for the industry to close off those retail avenues.

The simple fact, though, is that e-tickets and mobile retailing saves the industry massive amounts of money, and it is likely that the savings from having to provide fewer ticket offices, fewer TVMs, etc, will greatly outweigh the revenue loss from people feeling slightly more emboldened to pay when challenged.

 

[35B]

Indeed not, but if you're collecting short hop tickets days in advance then that's a massive red flag too.

Not necessarily - I've just purchased a split ticket combination that includes a single from Ely - Cambridge North as part of a much longer journey. So much of this is context dependent, which we're losing sight of

 

[saismee]

The cynic might say they are hoping having a special characteristic (diagnosed or otherwise) means they can get away with it, or at least reduce the severity of any sanction. A learned behaviour from the education/university system.

They might not be wrong if they did take it all the way to court.

I'll be the cynic, I don't think anyone I've met who claimed to have anxiety during a ticket check has been telling the truth. It's a stupid card to play because you  should be anxious while committing fraud.

For some people it is certainly a very debilitating condition in extreme cases.
I can’t see that driving you to petty crime though. Maybe I don’t know enough about that.

I used to have anxiety when I was a bit younger but it led me to extensively research the tickets and things I was buying. I made a mistake or two but nothing major (and wasn't willing to pay to sort out), and certainly nothing intentional. I think one time I travelled on a child ticket by mistake and felt so guilty I bought an adult one after I got home which went unused!

I remember one time I discussed purchasing tickets on the train on the forum and some forum members told me that boarding without a ticket was illegal and I wasn't correct that it was allowed. I didn't know the exact term at the time but remember always being told by staff that it was okay. My local station was a GA pay-train station so it was/is allowed. There's even a poster at the entrance explaining it. I always liked to give the conductors their little bit of commission whenever I would take a longer journey.

 

[MarlowDonkey]

. So much of this is context dependent, which we're losing sight of

There was a case where in the continued absence of services on East-West Rail, someone took the express bus from Oxford to Milton Keynes and then one stop on the train to Bletchley.

 

[saismee]

Not necessarily - I've just purchased a split ticket combination that includes a single from Ely - Cambridge North as part of a much longer journey. So much of this is context dependent, which we're losing sight of

On the GE side, Ipswich is one stop out of the Network South East zone so fares/advances are priced differently than at Manningtree. A very common split is Ipswich to Manningtree, followed by an off-peak or advance for the rest (and underground). Manningtree is used by fare dodgers in the same way as Vauxhall tickets are.

 

[Tetchytyke]

So much of this is context dependent, which we're losing sight of

It's always context-specific, just as it is with e-tickets. If they're part of a chain of split tickets the context means they're probably being used legitimately. If they're standalone then, for journeys like Vauxhall to Waterloo, they almost certainly are not being used legitimately.

It'd be the same with going back to TOD, if someone rocks up with a stack of tickets for a split-ticketed journey all collected last week they're probably legit; if someone collected a TOD ticket last week for a day single on its own then it probably isn't.

 

[hwl]

That doesn't mean that they are enabling fraud. Indeed, it seems to be the opposite: they appear to be far more compliant with TOC data requests than other retailers are.

E-ticket retailing probably needs to move to a situation where key data is automatically supplied rather than needing to be requested (unless Trainline set up a free API for TOCs?) so all the identifying data across all portals (including TfL oyster and contactless) can be compared automatically to look for potential fraud rather than being investigation based in hindsight.
The also needs to be an industry naughty person register, as a number of individual might not just being doing it with one TOC.
All potentially much easier with GBR with everything in one nominal organisation.

Trainline can only sell what the industry allows them to sell. If the industry doesn't want e-tickets and mobile retailing then it is easy for the industry to close off those retail avenues.

The simple fact, though, is that e-tickets and mobile retailing saves the industry massive amounts of money, and it is likely that the savings from having to provide fewer ticket offices, fewer TVMs, etc, will greatly outweigh the revenue loss from people feeling slightly more emboldened to pay when challenged.

E-ticketing is certainly saving parts of the industry lots of money, it is also costing the industry lots of money overall.

 

[MarlowDonkey]

E-ticket retailing probably needs to move to a situation where key data is automatically supplied rather than needing to be requested (unless Trainline set up a free API for TOCs?) so all the identifying data across all portals (including TfL oyster and contactless) can be compared automatically to look for potential fraud rather than being investigation based in hindsight.

The legality of that might be questionable (GPDR) and likely to be opposed by those warning of Big Brother watching.

 

[Tetchytyke]

E-ticket retailing probably needs to move to a situation where key data is automatically supplied rather than needing to be requested

I don't see why. If a TOC's revenue protection staff needs a data feed to tell them that people short-fare between common short-faring station pairs then I'd question what on earth that the TOC revenue protection staff do all day.

The data feed is meaningless unless you catch people in the act anyway. How can you prove who was using an e-ticket from a spreadsheet?

E-ticketing is certainly saving parts of the industry lots of money, it is also costing the industry lots of money overall.

Paying when challenged isn't a new thing, nor is doughnutting or short-faring.

I don't think e-tickets make it easier to evade fares, if anything they just make the matter easier to demonstrate. Back in the days of CCST they used to have to send someone out to stations like Burley Park and Bramley and hand vouchers out to people boarding at those stations. With e-tickets they can see you bought the ticket two seconds before approaching the barrier at Leeds, and they can see that the purchase time doesn't correlate with a station call, and can get people to incriminate themselves that way instead.

The issue, in my opinion anyway, isn't a new one either: the TOCs place too much reliance on automatic ticket barriers to do their revenue protection for them.