Morning all, what a thread!
A few comments from me, in no particular order:
Staff attitude:
I have always found the staff to be very friendly, however I will raise this thread with the local manager as it does seem to be the common perception that they are less friendly. Not my experience at all, but lets look at that.
Rovers:
Rovers do not traditionally work in ticket gates. This is because the rover is encoded from and to the same national location code usually, the gate therefore throws a wobbly when it tries to verify if the break of journey is a valid one because it cannot understand why a ticket would be valid from and to the same place. Its an industry thing and I am trying to influence a change. I accept however that for a very popular product its not a great experience, hence our work on it.
Barriers:
I put the ticket gates in at Blackpool North. Whilst on the face of the comments on this thread suggests they are in the wrong place, let me give you the reasons for why they went into that particular location:
- Blackpool has had a long standing issue of crowd control (people departing the station, often worse for wear), therefore the local agreement to keep passengers on the concourse until train departure;
- Train preparation and tanking also takes place at this station, being a terminus. This often means that there are pipes and other such stuff on the platforms which people would trip over, hence the concourse doors locked policy;
- In the project visits pre gating I must be honest and say I was horrified that the station concourse was full of people who had no intention of travelling and would sit drinking, smoking, causing trouble, the station toilets were possible the worst I had ever encountered and from a travelling passengers point of view, as well as our own staff safety it was a pretty horrible place to be;
- Therefore the gates went in that location because:
1. It was the most sensible place to put them given that we still wanted to keep the majority of the concourse clear for people to wait until their train was ready;
2. It put the toilets on the 'paid side' to ensure that people who had no intention of travelling and just wanted somewhere to sit all day and cause trouble would have to find somewhere else to go;
3. From a pedestrian flow point of view, being a terminus the entire train disembarks so there would be short bursts of queuing which needed space, hence the gates put closer to the station entrance/exit;
4. The only major issue with the location was if people had gone through to the paid side and then wanted to use the shop on the unpaid side, we specially instructed our staff to be aware of this and allow people through;
Gate logic:
There is no national process for updating gates, so if a TOC introduces a new product we have to assess whether it is likely to go through a gate and update the logic accordingly, sometimes this gets missed and we do encourage our staff to notify us of any tickets being rejected so we can update the logic accordingly.
Regards
Ian Borthwick
Revenue Projects Manager
Northern Rail
