Hi,
As some of you may know, I work for Northern Rail, I have contractual responsibility for the gates (as well as self service, ticket office, and portable ticketing systems).
A few things of note from reading this thread that posters may be interested in:
- I will raise the observations by the OP of the staff interaction with the local manager asap, (assuming of course it has not already been investigated, I'm returning from a weeks leave so have been out of the business).
- I was the project manager responsible for installing gates at Leeds, and our other 3 stations. I'm afraid I cannot go into all of the technicalities of install, but I do need you to accept that we would never put something into place without the correct safety process in place, and regular checks on process as any responsible business would do. In fact the safety case for Leeds was so complicated that it delayed the go live of the gates because we wanted to get it right;
- A gates natural state is 'sprung open' to the 'exit position', power keeps them in the closed position. Therefore in the event of a fire or other emergency, the power to the gates are cut, and they open as a fail safe;
- You can operate a gateline without a member of staff stood on the actual gateline, but they must be next to the 'Local Device Controller' and be able to visibly see the gateline so they can activate the gates if need be, we have such a device in the glass office on platform 8 at Leeds, (behind the information point). We put this in to protect our staff late at night;
- There are many reasons why a ticket will not work in a gate, the following is not an exhaustive list, but its what I use to check any complaints we receive, and you may find it of some use:
1. The magnetic strip has failed, caused potentially by:
- Faulty ticket stock;
- Failed ticket stock (common with season tickets, Metrocards, Countycards etc);
- Faulty ticket printer (most common with Avantix because there is no final check of the encoding when the print run is complete);
- Magnetic interference has wiped the data (magnet on a bag clasp, phone, blackberry etc etc);
- The conductor has inadvertently stamped through the magnetic stripe;
- The ticket has a fold in it (I once had one that could be made back into an aeroplane shape, I realise that I'm 'that sad' to test this, but it had been a long day);
- The conductor or customer has pulled the ticket (on Avantix) before it has finished printing;
2. The ticket is genuinely not valid at that location, caused by:
- an invalid break of journey (off route);
- an invalid ticket type at that location;
- an invalid route or status code at that location;
- the ticket is not yet valid (off peak day return before the time restriction ends for example);
- The ticket is not yet valid (it is being used prior to the date on the ticket);
- The ticket has failed the break of journey check (it is of a type that does not permit a BOJ);
- The ticket has expired;
3. There is an error in the software:
- This can happen, there are millions of journey permutations, and the software is surprisingly complicated to get right, even for an old hand like myself, or my colleagues;
- A new ticket has been introduced, but the gates have not been upgraded quickly enough;
- The magnetic encoding is erroneous (for example, the reason many rover types do not work is because they are encoded 'from' and 'to' the same National Location Code (NLC), the gates get confused because this fails the Break of Journey tables, and the 'valid origin NLC' tables, in some cases the encoding is historically junk which we need to change, its a lengthy and complex process;
- The magnetic encoding shares the same descriptor for more than one ticket (bear with me on this one: Whilst you may know a ticket as an 'Off Peak Day Return' for example (or Cheap Day Return in old money, pre simplification), the industry systems know it as something entirely different. In this case it is 2BDY. However, the magnetic strip technology is the same as it was pre 'computer based' ticket issuing systems (for those of you still with me, I mean APTIS). Because of various limitations with that technology, the ticket is only encoded with the second and third digits (in the case above 'BD'), it ignores the 2 (a throwback to second class because class is irrelevant to a ticket gate), and it ignores the final digit 'R' in this case. So it is possible that you may have more than one type of ticket at any given location with the same descriptor 'BD' for example. Its an industry oddity, one we cannot change, and therefore in rare occasions the programmer of the gates may have to go for the more common ticket and its associated restrictions, unless of course the encoding can be changed. Still with me?
As said earlier, its not an exhaustive list, but hopefully it gives you a feel for the complexities.
There is a general industry concern over the Avantix ticket stock which is being worked on currently, and the Northern gates have recently gone through an upgrade to accept the Mcard (the smartcard version of the Metrocard). I have a piece of work to do shortly to improve reliability on Avantix ticket printers, (once I have rolled out a replacement desktop ticketing system).
I hope that helps,and most importantly it is not expected that the normal person needs to have this type of indepth knowledge, all they care about is that the gate opens and rightly so.
However, given the level of interest on this forum in such matters, I would like to make a genuine open offer, if you have a ticket that you think should work, but it does not and you think its a programming error for example, perhaps you can wither PM me on this forum, or add it to this thread and we will look into it, if possible offer an explanation or a fix. It's not always going to be possible to do this, please realise, sometimes it may just be your magnetic strip has failed for example, however its an open offer made with a genuine wish to improve things.
Kind regards
Ian Borthwick
Revenue Projects Manager
Northern Rail