This isn't a railway issue it appears everywhere these days, do we really need wifi baby alarms, fridges and lightbulbs, driverless cars etc.
...
What seems to be ignored with every advance are the foreseeable problems, network failures, sabotage, hacking, malicious and criminal use and has anyone noticed that we are always being told that the latest encryption method is totally secure, even more so than than the last "uncrackable" code.
No, we don't need any of those things. A baby alarm need use no technology more complicated than a telephone - ie. late Victorian level - and the idea of connecting a fridge to the internet is just overcomplication to the point of idiocy, and totally useless. Unfortunately, that doesn't stop people doing it, because they know that enough people
are idiots that they will buy internet fridges without consideration for the idea being totally useless, just because they can.
Encryption is an intellectual arms race, with both sides developing new mathematical techniques to try and stay ahead. Actually, though, most encryption currently in use
is secure, and this is likely to remain the case for the foreseeable future. That attacks on systems nevertheless succeed is because the encryption is only one part of the system, and the attacks are directed at the other, more vulnerable, parts, in particular the human parts which are usually by far the weakest.
So much of this technological effort is aimed at helping us save time in our busy lives, none of it seems to do anything to make our lives less busy, more relaxed and, dare I say, happier.
Don't think I'm a Luddite...
Well, it's interesting that you mention the Luddites there, because the Luddite episode shows that incorrect thinking was already well entrenched a very long time ago. The purpose of "work" is not to make money, it is to get something done that needs to be done. Unfortunately the two have been conflated for such a long time that people have not only long ago lost sight of the distinction but have turned the whole thing the wrong way round and consider that work is a necessary prerequisite to obtaining money regardless of whether it actually does anything useful.
The reason your conundrum arises is that it is based on a false assumption. Technological effort is
not aimed at making our lives easier. It is aimed at making a small number of very rich people even richer. This would not be possible if our lives were too easy; indeed "rich" could even lose a lot of its meaning if things are taken far enough. Technological effort is more and more aimed at making us
think it's making our lives easier so that we keep on buying it, and whether it actually
does make our lives easier is becoming less and less relevant.
The error of the Luddites was that they saw the situation as a choice between only two alternatives, and both of those alternatives were wrong. What
should have happened when machinery was introduced was that the machinery did the work while the Luddites still got the money, but no longer needed to work to get it. In other words, technological innovation making people's lives easier. And that should then have spread to other areas of endeavour as machines became capable of doing a wider variety of tasks, with people doing less and less work as machines did it instead. What actually happened, and always has happened, is that the technological innovation had the purpose of making a small number of people much richer, and making a lot of people's lives easier was never in it. So although machines are doing more and more work, people are not doing less and less; instead they are doing about the same amount but it is less and less useful, and is only done at all because people think (or just assume without thinking) that the idea of having to do work to get money is a universal constant, rather than being contingent on circumstances which only apply because we refuse to contemplate changing them and instead devote ever more effort to maintaining the illusion that they are necessary.
Compare the science fiction worlds of Iain M Banks's "Culture", where intelligent machines indeed do do all the work and people do not have to do any, and Isaac Asimov's Robots, where intelligent machines capable of doing all the work do exist, but it never actually happens except on a small minority of worlds because people refuse to drop the fallacy of having to work for money and insist on continuing to make rods for their own backs. The Culture is by far the more attractive to live in were it possible, but Asimov's scenario is on historical evidence much more realistic, which is extremely depressing.
The occasional academic in the Sixties was moved to comment on the ridiculousness of the situation -
why do Americans now work all the time so they can all have a new car every year, when if they kept the same car for twenty or thirty years they would still be just as well provided with transport but not have to do anything like as much work? Even back then it was estimated that 80 or 90 percent of all work existed merely to perpetuate the illusion of the necessity of continuous work. And that was before computing technology vastly increased the range of tasks that machines were, or potentially were, capable of. The figures are even worse now. If technology genuinely was applied to make people's lives easier, and work restricted to only those tasks which are both genuinely necessary and beyond the capabilities of machines, a 4-hour week could have been the norm long ago, but since neither of these things have happened we're still stuck with 40 odd, and what is worse is that so many people fail to see the iniquity of the situation.
I am not opposed to new technology, but "keep it simple" is often the best decision. For example, is there a comparison between the failure rates / maintenance costs of "pre-computer" & "post-computer" era of the various classes of locomotives and multiple units ? I was once told that, on some classes, more "failures" could be ascribed to "dodgy sensor" problems, etc., than to serious mechanical problems.
Like my car, there was nothing wrong with the engine, electrics or fuel system but a fault with the engine management system just kept immobilising it.
This being one reason why I have a car that is 40 years old, and a motorbike that is 30 years old, both of which have no electronics at all - apart from stuff I have built myself and can therefore repair myself if it goes wrong without difficulty.
And it certainly does apply to trains as well - eg. Voyagers conking out at Dawlish because the braking resistances got splashed. Someone commented on this forum the other day that older rolling stock is more reliable because "it has bugger all in it", whereas modern stock has added several points of failure which never used to exist and still has all the same points of failure as older stock as well. And we have not gained anything worthwhile from it, or very little, certainly not enough to be worth the hassle.
Of course the one big difference between cars and trains in this respect is that railway workshops have full information available to diagnose and repair failed gadgetry, and staff that know what they're doing, whereas car manufacturers refuse to release this information and car mechanics lack the understanding to make use of it if they did. It should be a legal requirement that all such gadgetry should be fully open source, both software and hardware, and so constructed as to be repairable down to component level. Which brings us back to the point above about stuff being done to make money instead of to be useful.
The reason modern cars and trains can validly be considered to be "better" than older ones is in the advances in
mechanical engineering - better suspension designs giving a more comfortable ride or better handling, better combustion chamber and injector designs giving more complete combustion, better materials and manufacturing precision giving more durable engines and other components, and so on. With some limited exception for engine management systems, which do provide significant gains in efficiency, the changes in modern
electrical systems cannot be called an "advance". None of them are necessary, hardly any of them are even useful, but all of them add expense, complication and multiple possible points of failure - failure which is usually no more than a bad connection or a 5p component packing up, but cannot be localised to that level and which instead requires replacement of a complete assembly at a cost of hundreds of pounds despite it containing less complexity than a digital watch.
Well, on that thread I actively advocated for mobile ticketing, and of course still think that it's potentially very useful.
The technology is available that would allow us to use mobile ticketing in a meaningful way. Tickets could be bought on your phone, and (hopefully soon) paid for by use of mobile payment technology. The NFC chip on the phone and/or a barcode would allow the mobile ticket to operate a barrier, and allow the ticket to be checked and validated on the train. No need for queuing at a ticket office and no worries about losing/forgetting your ticket (mobile phones being ubiquitous and probably more readily recognised as being "lost"). For us "digital natives", it would be a natural process. Whilst there are of course problems with it (tech outages and so on), the current system is not perfect. It may also be liable to tech problems.
What you describe sounds like an absolute nightmare. Of course if it is merely an addition to paper ticket systems it doesn't matter, but the very real danger is that it will end up replacing them and we will lose a system which is simple, easy to use and independent, in favour of something which is hard to use, can go wrong in many ways which are not possible with paper tickets, and is not only dependent on multiple external systems but even requires us to pay extra for parts of those systems.
"Tickets could be bought on your phone"
What phone?
"paid for by use of mobile payment technology"
"Payment technology" = notes and coins. "Mobile payment technology" = carrying notes and coins. So we have that already, it's dead simple, it works by itself, and there isn't anything to go wrong. "
Electronic mobile payment technology" requires converting notes and coins to electronic form, access to and authorisation to use a system capable of handling that electronic form, and that system or the other systems which interface to it not to be down when you want to use them; it introduces multiple extra steps, all of which either do or potentially could incur extra costs; and it doesn't actually make anything any easier, it just creates sufficient illusion of being easier to make people think it might be a good idea.
"The NFC chip on the phone and/or a barcode would allow the mobile ticket to operate a barrier"
So does the magnetic strip on the back of a paper ticket.
"allow the ticket to be checked and validated on the train"
So does the printing on the front of a paper ticket.
"No need for queuing at a ticket office"
Incorrect solution to a different problem which not only fails to solve it but by pushing it under the carpet encourages its perpetuation. Instead, massively simplify the outrageous overcomplication of the ticketing system as it stands, which is what really needs doing, and provide plenty of ticket machines so there is always a very high chance that one will be free.
"no worries about losing/forgetting your ticket (mobile phones being ubiquitous and probably more readily recognised as being "lost")"
...mobile phones
not being "ubiquitous" and the absence of one in my pocket being a matter of no concern whatsoever since it represents the expected state of affairs.
If what you advocate comes to replace paper tickets - which as I said is a very real danger; we already have lost normal tickets on London buses - then I would simply stop considering the train as a possible journey option. Your system would require me to pay for a mobile phone; to pay for the use of a mobile phone network; to pay to obtain authorisation to use a system which would make money accessible via a phone; to pay, and make an extra trip, to convert money into the form used by such a system... and then if the system decides to revoke my authorisation, or the phone battery runs out, or lightning hits the mast, or this, or that, I'm screwed. There is nothing remotely "easy" about it; instead it's a whole lot more messing about doing stuff I don't currently have to bother about, and paying more to do it. It would change the train vs. car balance from one which may come down on one side or the other depending on route, destination, timing etc, to one which always comes down on the car side without having to bother thinking about it because buying the train ticket has been made ridiculously difficult, expensive and complicated whereas buying petrol is as easy as buying milk.