Ticket machine speed

[Biggus Tiggus]

First time poster, so I'm not sure if this is strictly the right section, but here goes.

Having occasion to go to Bristol next Tuesday, departing after 12:00, and returning on Thursday, again departing after 12:00, I paid a visit to Marylebone station to ask what the cheapest price would be, figuring the queues would be shorter there than at Paddington.

Whilst I was right about the queues being shorter, and the clerk was nice enough, it took no less than seven minutes for the machine to come up with a price, which seems excessive to me.

Is this problem unique to Marylebone, or do other stations have excessive query times like that?

 

[island]

I doubt it should normally take that long; perhaps they were having network problems?

 

[Biggus Tiggus]

Sadly, the look of resignation on the clerk's face when it got to 2 minutes suggested they were used to it taking that long. Could it be down to the ticket machines they use, given I've never experienced delays like that at other stations?

 

[Greenback]

Clearly, there is something badly wrong if it really did take 7 minutes. The clerk could have looked up dozens of fares in an old style paper Fares Manual in that time!

Perhaps they were indeed experiencing network problems. If the clerk had been having trouble for more than a few minutes they would have looked very resigned.

 

[barrykas]

Sounds to me like whoever it was neglected to filter by class, as it's not unusual for a search (including availability check) to take three minutes just for Standard! Even walk up fares can take thirty seconds or so to appear.

If it had been me, I would've started out by checking one of the WebTIS based sites to find the cheapest price, then probably booked it through Journey Planner so that nobody could sell it out from under me, and finally manually put the reservation details into FasTIS...and still not taken seven minutes. :roll:

It'd be interesting to know if Northern have similar performance issues with their FasTIS machines...

 

[hairyhandedfool]

Can't speak for Chiltern but for Northern, depending on the journey, Fastis has serious issues with searching for availability and only being able to search three trains at a time is a serious help to that problem, even when limited to a particular class of travel.

Take the number of ticket types available (remembering that it is doubled for return journeys), then allow ten seconds for each one (on a good day) and you're pretty close, for just those three trains. As a brucey bonus, if you have to search one train earlier than those selected, it completely forgets the availability of any other trains that have already been searched and starts again.

If someone wants first class travel in one direction and standard in the other, you're better off treating them as separate enquires or you'll be there all day!

 

[Greenback]

Bring back APTIS and a pile of big books!

 

[telstarbox]

Welcome to the forum.
For future reference, the BRFares.com website is a good place to start when looking for fares. The following link lists all the standard and return fares between London and Bristol (and shows how many the computer has to trawl through!)

http://brfares.com/#fares?orig=1072&dest=BRI&rlc=

Note that any fares marked "Advance" are available in limited numbers and sometimes not at all depending on the train.

 

[barrykas]

Bring back APTIS and a pile of big books!

That and CRS...And occasionally unreadable five line barcodes.

 

[hairyhandedfool]

CRS, barcodes and a mountain of manuals might still be quicker than FasTIS!

 

[barrykas]

CRS, barcodes and a mountain of manuals might still be quicker than FasTIS!

You may well think that, I couldn't possibly comment.

Having said that, I was constantlly tweaking the local programmes on our APTIS machines to reflect the most popular tickets (usually Advances) that weren't otherwise in the memory.

Mind you, if I was in charge of ticketing, I'd probably scrap the multiple levels of Advance tickets and go back to the good old days of SuperAdvance (booked by 6pm the day before) and Apex (booked a week before). It'd make life a lot easier.