Ticket Barrier Blues

[CyrusWuff]

My recent bugbear is the gateline at Manchester Victoria, which refuses to allow my ticket office-issued Cheap Day Return from Todmorden during the evening peak. It has a B1 restriction, ie not valid before 0930 but with no evening restriction. Whilst my tickets are bought against a Senior Railcard, this does not appear to be the issue - they work fine on other occasions when I return later in the evening, and of course it has happily accepted the outward portions on my arrival at Victoria.

The basic issue is that gates essentially only look at the ticket type when determining whether it's valid at a given time or not, so they'll apply the same AM and PM peak restrictions to all Off-Peak Day tickets, regardless of origin and destination.

There is a way round this with tickets issued on Smartcard, where it's possible to encode the actual restriction code, but I don't know if any Ticket Issuing Systems or Gates are configured to actually use that format.

 

[DelW]

I finally got to talk to a manager at my local station (Winchester) who told me that SWR had set all gatelines for which they are responsible to reject any ticket bought with a railcard. It's a revenue protection exercise, planned to continue until the middle of this month. While at Winchester my railcard is now always inspected, but like other people my experience at Waterloo is that gateline staff either don't know or don't care about checking railcards, and just let you through - so what's the point?

That's interesting - there was a period last year when my senior railcard-discounted tickets were always rejected at my local (SWR) station, even when newly issued by the ticket office. On the last occasion it happened, the gateline assistant who let me through said, "it should work from next week", which was correct. I assumed that there was a software update, but maybe SWR were doing the same thing then? If so it was ineffective, as none of the human checkers asked to see my railcard.

If SWR are concerned about revenue checks, they might start by persuading all their mainline guards to do ticket inspections rather than just the minority who currently do.

 

[gazr]

Mentioned this in another thread: I frequently buy a Travelcard Zone 1-9 with a Gold Card discount and every time I go through Liverpool Street station, the barrier invalidates the ticket (goes in and out the machine 2-3 times). Having had this happen 3 or so times and I now have to find someone to let me out, as it's a right pain otherwise. Barrier should not invalidate a perfectly valid ticket.

 

[Mcr Warrior]

Mentioned this in another thread: I frequently buy a Travelcard Zone 1-9 with a Gold Card discount and every time I go through Liverpool Street station, the barrier invalidates the ticket (goes in and out the machine 2-3 times). Having had this happen 3 or so times and I now have to find someone to let me out, as it's a right pain otherwise. Barrier should not invalidate a perfectly valid ticket.

What barrier "error code" usually gets displayed?

 

[Whisky Papa]

The basic issue is that gates essentially only look at the ticket type when determining whether it's valid at a given time or not, so they'll apply the same AM and PM peak restrictions to all Off-Peak Day tickets, regardless of origin and destination.

There is a way round this with tickets issued on Smartcard, where it's possible to encode the actual restriction code, but I don't know if any Ticket Issuing Systems or Gates are configured to actually use that format.

Right, thanks, I'd assumed it was sophisticated enough to read the validity code too. When I was working in the travel centre at Bradford Interchange, I don't recall being told the gateline there was throwing up this problem with a similar mix of restricted (within West Yorkshire) Off-Peak Day Returns and unrestricted ones from outside. Were those gates set up differently, or maybe I was just lucky that my regular shift finished at 1600 and I missed any problems!

 

[Peter Mugridge]

Mentioned this in another thread: I frequently buy a Travelcard Zone 1-9 with a Gold Card discount and every time I go through Liverpool Street station, the barrier invalidates the ticket (goes in and out the machine 2-3 times). Having had this happen 3 or so times and I now have to find someone to let me out, as it's a right pain otherwise. Barrier should not invalidate a perfectly valid ticket.

I've had this happen a few times at Liverpool Street with a Travelcard; I think it's one specific barrier which does this as the others seem to pass the ticket correctly but I can't remember the number of it...

 

[DelW]

Another example earlier today. On a visit to Havant, my Railcard discounted tickets were refused by the barrier in both directions. In one direction the gateline assistant gave my ticket a cursory glance, in the other I was waved through without even that (to be fair, I think he was dealing with another passenger at the time). In neither case was my Railcard requested or shown.

If this is a revenue protection policy, it's utterly ineffective, and serves only to delay passengers without deterring possible Railcard misuse. Although at least today there was an on-train check on my return journey on SWR.

Maybe in future, Railcards should be issued with a barcode printed on them, with that being scanned at the gate before the ticket. But that would presumably require investment in additional software.

 

[AdamWW]

The basic issue is that gates essentially only look at the ticket type when determining whether it's valid at a given time or not, so they'll apply the same AM and PM peak restrictions to all Off-Peak Day tickets, regardless of origin and destination.

Unfortunately some barrier staff appear to have been programmed in the same way...