Trivia: barriers serving multiple transport systems.

[plugwash]

In london there are numerous locations where ticket barriers serve various mixtures of National Rail, London Underground, DLR and even in one case tramlink. This creates a few issues as have been discussed ad-nausium elsewhere on this forum. It left me wondering a few things though.

1. What is the most transport systems behind the same barriers at a station? I think it's probablly three with National Rail, London Underground and Tramlink behind the same barriers at Wimbledon and National rail, London Underground and DLR behind the same gateline at Stratford.
3. Is this a london-specific pjenomena? All of the interchanges i've seen in other parts of the country either don't have barriers at all or have the tram/metro platforms outside of the barriered area.

 

[duncanp]

In Birmingham, you have National Rail and West Midlands Metro services behind the same barrier at Jewellery Quarter and similarly in West Bromwich at The Hawthorns.

 

[busestrains]

In Birmingham, you have National Rail and West Midlands Metro services behind the same barrier at Jewellery Quarter and similarly in West Bromwich at The Hawthorns.

How does that work? Tickets on the Birmingham Trams are bought onboard the tram so does anyone wanting to use the trams at Jewellery Quarter and The Hawthorns have to ask the barrier staff to be let through? If so then surely the barriers are pointless as anyone could just go through without a ticket by saying they are using the trams?

 

[Kite159]

In Birmingham, you have National Rail and West Midlands Metro services behind the same barrier at Jewellery Quarter and similarly in West Bromwich at The Hawthorns.

When did those barriers go in?

 

[duncanp]

How does that work? Tickets on the Birmingham Trams are bought onboard the tram so does anyone wanting to use the trams at Jewellery Quarter and The Hawthorns have to ask the barrier staff to be let through? If so then surely the barriers are pointless as anyone could just go through without a ticket by saying they are using the trams?

Apologies everyone, but I have made a big balls up.

Trains and trams share a common entrance at Jewellery Quarter and The Hawthorns, but there are no barriers, precisely because tickets for the trams are bought on board.

There is barrier free interchange between the two systems at these stations as well.

 

[plugwash]

Yeah, it's similar here in Greater Manchester, there are various stations with a mixture of rail and metrolink, but either they don't have barriers at all or the entrances to the metrolink platforms are outside the gate line.

 

[Joshua_Harman]

Portsmouth Harbour Station and the Passenger ferries share A gateline

 

[Recessio]

In london there are numerous locations where ticket barriers serve various mixtures of National Rail, London Underground, DLR and even in one case tramlink. This creates a few issues as have been discussed ad-nausium elsewhere on this forum. It left me wondering a few things though.

1. What is the most transport systems behind the same barriers at a station? I think it's probablly three with National Rail, London Underground and Tramlink behind the same barriers at Wimbledon and National rail, London Underground and DLR behind the same gateline at Stratford.
3. Is this a london-specific pjenomena? All of the interchanges i've seen in other parts of the country either don't have barriers at all or have the tram/metro platforms outside of the barriered area.

Is Stratford four with the Elizabeth line? (haven't used it in years so unsure if it has separate platforms)

 

[busestrains]

Is Stratford four with the Elizabeth line? (haven't used it in years so unsure if it has separate platforms)

Elizabeth Line is part of National Rail so no different to Abellio Greater Anglia or C2C or London Overground or any other TOC.

 

[southern442]

Would the Tyne and Wear metro achieve this with National Rail anywhere? Sunderland?

 

[plugwash]

Would the Tyne and Wear metro achieve this with National Rail anywhere?

I don't think so.

As far as I can tell the T&W metro has three interchanges with the mainline rail network in three locations "newcastle"/"central station", "heworth" and "sunderland".

At "newcastle"/"central station" the train and metro stations are seperate stations with their own ticket barriers. Heworth seems to be a similar story, with the mainline and metro stations being seperate on different lines and opposite sides of a road and only the metro station having barriers.

Sunderland appears to be the only truely shared station, but I don't think it has any ticket barriers.I did find an article from 2006 saying they were "considering" installing barriers there ( https://www.chroniclelive.co.uk/news/north-east-news/new-barriers-stop-fare-dodgers-1521490 ) but I can't find any evidence that they ever actually did.

I also found a bunch of 360 degree photos on google street view from "vectrix surveys", apparently from 2021. Using these to virtually explore the station I found no evidence of ticket barriers. https://www.google.com/maps/place/S...acf026c1a300916e!8m2!3d54.9053166!4d-1.382306

 

[scrapy]

I don't think so.

As far as I can tell the T&W metro has three interchanges with the mainline rail network in three locations "newcastle"/"central station", "heworth" and "sunderland".

At "newcastle"/"central station" the train and metro stations are seperate stations with their own ticket barriers. Heworth seems to be a similar story, with the mainline and metro stations being seperate on different lines and opposite sides of a road and only the metro station having barriers.

Sunderland appears to be the only truely shared station, but I don't think it has any ticket barriers.I did find an article from 2006 saying they were "considering" installing barriers there ( https://www.chroniclelive.co.uk/news/north-east-news/new-barriers-stop-fare-dodgers-1521490 ) but I can't find any evidence that they ever actually did.

I also found a bunch of 360 degree photos on google street view from "vectrix surveys", apparently from 2021. Using these to virtually explore the station I found no evidence of ticket barriers. https://www.google.com/maps/place/Sunderland/@54.9054165,-1.3822973,3a,80.4y,24.9h,94.92t/data=!3m8!1e1!3m6!1sAF1QipPV14ktqRm11KgUDSkdgmKe6mxFdU918asHaTmx!2e10!3e11!6shttps://lh5.googleusercontent.com/p/AF1QipPV14ktqRm11KgUDSkdgmKe6mxFdU918asHaTmx=w203-h100-k-no-pi0.18208921-ya162.64236-ro-2.0670595-fo100!7i8192!8i4096!4m5!3m4!1s0x487e6688ebad5d49:0xacf026c1a300916e!8m2!3d54.9053166!4d-1.382306

Problem with barriering Sunderland and Park Lane is the proximity of University, Milfield, St. Peters and Stadium of Light all also being a short walk away. Fare dodgers would likely alight there and walk. Would be to expensive to barrier and staff them all. They've probably decided random revenue operations are a better use of resources.

 

[busestrains]

Would the Tyne and Wear metro achieve this with National Rail anywhere? Sunderland?

I don't think so.

As far as I can tell the T&W metro has three interchanges with the mainline rail network in three locations "newcastle"/"central station", "heworth" and "sunderland".

At "newcastle"/"central station" the train and metro stations are seperate stations with their own ticket barriers. Heworth seems to be a similar story, with the mainline and metro stations being seperate on different lines and opposite sides of a road and only the metro station having barriers.

Sunderland appears to be the only truely shared station, but I don't think it has any ticket barriers.I did find an article from 2006 saying they were "considering" installing barriers there ( https://www.chroniclelive.co.uk/news/north-east-news/new-barriers-stop-fare-dodgers-1521490 ) but I can't find any evidence that they ever actually did.

I also found a bunch of 360 degree photos on google street view from "vectrix surveys", apparently from 2021. Using these to virtually explore the station I found no evidence of ticket barriers. https://www.google.com/maps/place/Sunderland/@54.9054165,-1.3822973,3a,80.4y,24.9h,94.92t/data=!3m8!1e1!3m6!1sAF1QipPV14ktqRm11KgUDSkdgmKe6mxFdU918asHaTmx!2e10!3e11!6shttps://lh5.googleusercontent.com/p/AF1QipPV14ktqRm11KgUDSkdgmKe6mxFdU918asHaTmx=w203-h100-k-no-pi0.18208921-ya162.64236-ro-2.0670595-fo100!7i8192!8i4096!4m5!3m4!1s0x487e6688ebad5d49:0xacf026c1a300916e!8m2!3d54.9053166!4d-1.382306

Problem with barriering Sunderland and Park Lane is the proximity of University, Milfield, St. Peters and Stadium of Light all also being a short walk away. Fare dodgers would likely alight there and walk. Would be to expensive to barrier and staff them all. They've probably decided random revenue operations are a better use of resources.

Would it be possible to program ticket barriers to work for both National Rail tickets and Tyne & Wear Metro tickets? The ticketing of both of these is completely separate so i wonder whether installing barriers that work for both types of tickets is even possible?

 

[DanNCL]

Would the Tyne and Wear metro achieve this with National Rail anywhere? Sunderland?

I don't think so.
As far as I can tell the T&W metro has three interchanges with the mainline rail network in three locations "newcastle"/"central station", "heworth" and "sunderland".

At "newcastle"/"central station" the train and metro stations are seperate stations with their own ticket barriers. Heworth seems to be a similar story, with the mainline and metro stations being seperate on different lines and opposite sides of a road and only the metro station having barriers.

Sunderland appears to be the only truely shared station, but I don't think it has any ticket barriers.I did find an article from 2006 saying they were "considering" installing barriers there ( https://www.chroniclelive.co.uk/news/north-east-news/new-barriers-stop-fare-dodgers-1521490 ) but I can't find any evidence that they ever actually did.

I also found a bunch of 360 degree photos on google street view from "vectrix surveys", apparently from 2021. Using these to virtually explore the station I found no evidence of ticket barriers. https://www.google.com/maps/place/S...acf026c1a300916e!8m2!3d54.9053166!4d-1.382306

Problem with barriering Sunderland and Park Lane is the proximity of University, Milfield, St. Peters and Stadium of Light all also being a short walk away. Fare dodgers would likely alight there and walk. Would be to expensive to barrier and staff them all. They've probably decided random revenue operations are a better use of resources.

Would it be possible to program ticket barriers to work for both National Rail tickets and Tyne & Wear Metro tickets? The ticketing of both of these is completely separate so i wonder whether installing barriers that work for both types of tickets is even possible?

The Tyne & Wear Metro is an interesting one. Newcastle Central has separate gatelines for Metro and National Rail. Sunderland is unbarriered, and will likely remain so because of Grand Central’s buy on board policy (that said, it didn’t stop Hartlepool from getting barriers!). There’s a possibility of Sunderland getting barriers with the rebuild, but as mentioned above as a minimum Park Lane would also need to be fitted with them for them to be effective.

Heworth has a gateline for Metro but not National Rail. There is a direct connection between the westbound national rail platform and the eastbound Metro platform, and for a while this was a way to bypass the gateline for Metro, but this has now been closed off.

Metro barriers could be programmed to read credit card sized national rail tickets, but won’t be able read anything with a barcode as they don’t have any scanner on them. I seem to recall reading on here that LNER were programming their barriers to read Nexus smart cards, but I’m not sure if anything came of that.

 

[Tetchytyke]

There is through ticketing from National Rail to the T&W Metro, but I'm unsure how the barriers manage this. Certainly the NR barriers don't read Metro-issued tickets, or didn't when I've tried to use a DayRover or NE Explorer.

 

[DanNCL]

There is through ticketing from National Rail to the T&W Metro, but I'm unsure how the barriers manage this. Certainly the NR barriers don't read Metro-issued tickets, or didn't when I've tried to use a DayRover or NE Explorer.

Neither sets of barriers currently read the other's tickets, but both are theoretically able to be programmed to do so. Currently an error message comes up.

Same happens if you try using a smartcard not issued by Nexus (apart from an ENCTS pass) on the Metro barriers. There's been a few times where I've come back from London, forgotten to swap the smartcards round in my ticket wallet and tried getting through the Metro barriers with an Oyster card! Although of course that one is a correct rejection of a smartcard!