bb21
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Hull Trains do in fact offer this facility.
I guess it is a much easier thing to manage with 90 departures a week.
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Why don't the TOCs address this issue (collection of tickets)?
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Hull Trains do in fact offer this facility.
I guess it is a much easier thing to manage with 90 departures a week.
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EssexGonzo
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And I guess therein lies my point.....how many "normal punters" understand the NRCoC? I don' t even know what the NRC "small o" C is. And a reservation.....? Then issue here is not being able to print a ticket at home.
Which means that our fragmented, bureaucratic, monopolistic and over-unionised railway is not run today with the customer in mind. It's about catching people out and needing to understand nuances. Airlines are light years ahead in terms of making things simple.
All of which means that apart from my commute into central London where I really have no choice, I'll never choose to take the train. The railway to me is not transparent. In this country I will always choose the car or plane first.
Unfortunately, despite being outdated, we are stuck with Advantix for the foreseeable future
Avantix Mobile does feature some flavour of ToD type functionality. I believe GatEx (in NatEx days) were the first to use it, but most TOCs don't for some reason.
And I'm told that Atos are currently working on the second hardware refresh for Avantix.
DeeGee
Member
Exactly the same prices as if you were to walk up to a window and buy tickets. There's a fee for express delivery, I believe, but not first class mail. And they accept Tesco Clubcard points at 2:1!
I suspect that they make most of their money providing the infrastructure for most of the other TOCs' online booking engines.
Solent&Wessex
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Because it costs money.
Crosscountry Avantix machines have better functionality than my TOCs, but that is because, I believe, some of the functionality is provided by connecting to the train wifi.
The trains I work on do no have Wifi. I think the same functionality could be achieved by connecting to the company issued Blackberry phone, but that will cost money too.
And yes, a new version is due out later in the year, which I am told will remove the function to swipe and sign cards and obtain manual authorisation - allegedly due to changes in card security measures imposed by card issuers.
That could be tricky for some foreign visitors. I don't think roll out of chip and pin or chip and sign worldwide is complete.
Most notably all cards issued in the USA don't have chips
headshot119
Established Member
No where near completed, since moving to another store recently I now work next to a large expanse of docklands, the amount of foreign customers we see with none chip and pin cards is quite high.
The railway could learn a lot from other online companies.
Firstly, you could have a system where people can print tickets at home, but not get charged until they're printed.
How? Tesco and others have developed software (that runs within a browser) that ensures you'll only ever be able to print one single ticket, or in the case of Tesco and the like - unique discount vouchers.
Of course you still need paper and ink, but if the page print fails (and I expect that if the printer reports an error, the software will detect this) you can either print again or you won't get charged and can be given another option on how to proceed.
When ordering a ticket for postage, look at Amazon for a 'order within the next xx minutes for free next day delivery' with further options for missing that (like special delivery). You might also have the ability to have a ticket delivered to a local newsagent that participates in one of the collection schemes now in operation, so that you can be at work and still receive something that needs a signature.
One day you might add an option to have an e-ticket delivered to your NFC-enabled smartphone, which can then be transferred securely (and only the once) to your smartcard.
Then the ticket on departure option might be much less used.
Firstly, you could have a system where people can print tickets at home, but not get charged until they're printed.
How? Tesco and others have developed software (that runs within a browser) that ensures you'll only ever be able to print one single ticket, or in the case of Tesco and the like - unique discount vouchers.
Of course you still need paper and ink, but if the page print fails (and I expect that if the printer reports an error, the software will detect this) you can either print again or you won't get charged and can be given another option on how to proceed.
When ordering a ticket for postage, look at Amazon for a 'order within the next xx minutes for free next day delivery' with further options for missing that (like special delivery). You might also have the ability to have a ticket delivered to a local newsagent that participates in one of the collection schemes now in operation, so that you can be at work and still receive something that needs a signature.
One day you might add an option to have an e-ticket delivered to your NFC-enabled smartphone, which can then be transferred securely (and only the once) to your smartcard.
Then the ticket on departure option might be much less used.
That sounds awful. "Special software" usually means to me that it'll only work on a small selection of operating systems, and install who knows what. This sort of thing can easily be circumvented by printing to PDF or other tricks too, or even using an old fashioned photocopier.
I'd also imagine that it'd take a guard more time to check print@home tickets as they have to cross-reference with a list of valid ticket codes etc, or have a device with a barcode scanner which is more expense and something else to carry/fail. Ideally, of course such functionality should be built into Avantix's successor rather than being yet another device.
Solent&Wessex
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I assume it would apply only to Chip & Pin cards, as now. Foreign cards which have no chip will swipe and sign now, quite happily, without the need to phone for authorisation. Although I understand the lengthy delay is due to trying to get a system in place which works for all TOCs, seeing as about 30% + of cards are currently declined.
Hopefully it's just an HTML5 app, which should run on almost everything and not do anything untoward. Even on smartphones, many of which can print to any printer on a network (including wireless printers).
Chrome, Dolphin and Opera all run HTML5 on Android. I expect Safari does on iOS. And then there's the low-end Firefox OS for mobile, which also runs on HTML5.
It does indeed. In fact, before Apple's app store for native apps was released, they actually encouraged developers to write web apps in HTML5 instead. It can be surprisingly powerful (albeit not as good as native code, of course).
Sorry for the delay in replying, I have been abroad
In my experience, the ID (in my case a credit card) has always been checked in Germany* & Sweden, usually (80/90%) in Switzerland & sometimes (~50%) in Belgium. My usage in other countries has been too low to guage the frequency of ID checks.
* Bear in mind, though, that in Germany ontrain checks on non-Intercity trains are vey infrequent. Travelling on around 30 such trains last week (some journeys of 2 hours +), tickets were only checked on 4 or 5.
edwin_m
Veteran Member
As pointed out, print at home is easier for Advance tickets because each ticket can carry a unique code and the checker on the train can compare this with a list of codes issued for that train and detect any invalid or duplicate tickets. This does however require on-train checking and not just barriers! It also means that the print-at-home tickets can be restricted to trains where the staff have the relevant checking equipment.
It's more tricky for walk-up tickets, because to avoid the photocopying problem each checking point needs an always-on data link to the back office. Otherwise two people could use the same ticket on different trains at about the same time.
It's more tricky for walk-up tickets, because to avoid the photocopying problem each checking point needs an always-on data link to the back office. Otherwise two people could use the same ticket on different trains at about the same time.
How many departures a week do most unstaffed, un-machined, stations have in comparison?
Since you can just buy walk-up tickets on the train, print-at-home tickets for only ADVANCE tickets would be a nice idea.
bb21
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Your point being?
I was pointing out that HT is a TOC where this could be implemented fairly easily as it had few departures.
My point is that I would think unstaffed stations generally speaking will have fewer departures than staffed ones. If it is relatively easy to implement for TOCs with few departures perhaps it is also be relatively easy to implement for unstaffed stations with few departures.
But there's lots of unstaffed (and unmachined) stations so in total lots of departures.
My local station is unstaffed and has at least 8 departures an hour so it's not always the case that unstaffed stations have few departures. It recently had a ticket machine installed but I witnessed someone unable to pick up an advance ticket for immediate use there last week as the connection to the central system was down.
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