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Through work I've head rumblings of a new system on its way along with possible test TOC.
From the few details/rumours I've heard it'll be based off or similar to a small tablet, 7" sort of size and will work with a separate printer and pinpad. Also it might be able to read QR codes and e-ticket barcodes which would be nice. And might allow us to accept online only cards on trains.
From the few details/rumours I've heard it'll be based off or similar to a small tablet, 7" sort of size and will work with a separate printer and pinpad. Also it might be able to read QR codes and e-ticket barcodes which would be nice. And might allow us to accept online only cards on trains.
MyFriendMary
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If that does prove to be true. I think I might have a new wife
Separate printer sounds a bit odd and just something extra to carry around and lose!
If that does prove to be true. I think I might have a new wife
Separate printer sounds a bit odd and just something extra to carry around and lose!
I think separate printer is more like some little device that attaches to the tablet.
Hopefully with a cradle that actually holds the tickets in place and doesn't let them all slip forward and jam the printer up. The rubber grip pads were never that brilliant at it, even before they wore out!
I've seen a system before on buses in Greece using an LG smartphone connected to a small receipt printer carried on the conductors belt - were it not for ticket barriers you could do something similar using the old SPORTIS stock.
transmanche
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That still may be possible, as many gates have barcode readers (certainly the ones at East Coast stations).
BestWestern
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Acceptance of all credit cards is a must, and needs to be at the top of the development list. Various rumours abound that the banks are not at all happy at continuing to process offline payments and the various authorisation issues that come with them. The railway must be the worst offender by a long way.
Had joined-up thinking and common sense not been outlawed on the modern railway, somebody might have suggested building into the GSM-R system an 'auxiliary' facility, which might have used the blanket coverage capability to carry additional secondary data like ticketing systems. Alas, such a suggestion is outrageous of course...
As for the kit itself, it needs to be extremely tough - they get dropped regularly, and they suffer some heavy abuse. A tablet device alone would last a few months max before becoming corrupted by the constant shock to the hard drive etc, or be wrecked due to the screen smashing on a regular basis, assuming it didn't get nicked first. A benefit of the current set-up is that from the public's perspective the thing is just a strange, alien ticket machine - I imagine theft would have been rife in the early days if the scroats knew what was actually in there was a natty little Casio palmtop running Windows; nowadays of course you'd be lucky to get a fiver for it, it's old-tech indeed.
Replacement is long overdue, but what the TOCs really need to do is club together and get the contract handed to somebody else, with a proviso that the new design uses readily available components wherever possible, supplied at a sensible price. Alas it won't happen, and Atos (or 'Wordline - an Atos company') will no doubt continue to charge the railway joke prices for the next 10 years - 50 quid for a printer battery anybody? Eight pounds for a little plastic stylus? (you can buy a pack of three in pound shops). The best one is the fixed fee of around 300 quid every time one needs to go back for any sort of repair. Hang on, so it's your kit, which we have no choice but to lease from you at whatever ludicrous price you decree, it's ancient, outdated and woefully unreliable - and you get to bill us a fortune every time it packs up!? Think I might start a ticket machine racket myself! And all of this in an industry which is desperate to shed staff to cut costs! Scary stuff...
Had joined-up thinking and common sense not been outlawed on the modern railway, somebody might have suggested building into the GSM-R system an 'auxiliary' facility, which might have used the blanket coverage capability to carry additional secondary data like ticketing systems. Alas, such a suggestion is outrageous of course...
As for the kit itself, it needs to be extremely tough - they get dropped regularly, and they suffer some heavy abuse. A tablet device alone would last a few months max before becoming corrupted by the constant shock to the hard drive etc, or be wrecked due to the screen smashing on a regular basis, assuming it didn't get nicked first. A benefit of the current set-up is that from the public's perspective the thing is just a strange, alien ticket machine - I imagine theft would have been rife in the early days if the scroats knew what was actually in there was a natty little Casio palmtop running Windows; nowadays of course you'd be lucky to get a fiver for it, it's old-tech indeed.
Replacement is long overdue, but what the TOCs really need to do is club together and get the contract handed to somebody else, with a proviso that the new design uses readily available components wherever possible, supplied at a sensible price. Alas it won't happen, and Atos (or 'Wordline - an Atos company') will no doubt continue to charge the railway joke prices for the next 10 years - 50 quid for a printer battery anybody? Eight pounds for a little plastic stylus? (you can buy a pack of three in pound shops). The best one is the fixed fee of around 300 quid every time one needs to go back for any sort of repair. Hang on, so it's your kit, which we have no choice but to lease from you at whatever ludicrous price you decree, it's ancient, outdated and woefully unreliable - and you get to bill us a fortune every time it packs up!? Think I might start a ticket machine racket myself! And all of this in an industry which is desperate to shed staff to cut costs! Scary stuff...
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Helvellyn
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I'm still holding out for Sportis 2000.
Great post. I can't agree enough with everything!
BurtonM
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I just googled SPORTIS 2000, one of the first results was a Google Groups thread from 1998!
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/uk.railway/eUAMns4EWTM
A regular tablet wouldn't last long!
We use heavy-duty tablets at work. They're not obtrusively bulky, nothing like what's in use on the railways (although obviously nowhere near as slim as an iPad either!). We've only managed to break one in two years so far; they've survived being dropped on solid concrete floors, sprayed with water, ballpoint pens jabbed at them instead of the stylus and other misfortunes!
Given that the design is already a few years old, I'd imagine better models are available even now.
And by the time the railways actually move onto something, even better models will exist. Whether they have access to them is another matter.
Large companies always seem to be behind when it comes to technology improvements. I guess the trains themselves can be an exception at times as they are modern when new orders are placed.
Sent from my Nexus 5 using Tapatalk
Large companies always seem to be behind when it comes to technology improvements. I guess the trains themselves can be an exception at times as they are modern when new orders are placed.
Sent from my Nexus 5 using Tapatalk
Just one point: tablets don't generally (ever?) have hard drives -- they use solid state storage, usually an SD card.
tsr
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There may be a very small number of older ones around which do have conventional hard drives. And of course onboard storage, aside from an interface to a card, is also often provided. Whether the railway would find it best to store timetable/fares data on SD cards rather than loaded onto devices themselves, I don't know. Even considerations like that often become pretty complex, and I wouldn't sum up my ideas about such a system's requirements and implementations here, as I do not have the time or inclination to try to fill this forum with an essay!
BestWestern
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dtaylor84:1740977 said:
A fair point; I find tablets rather a poor halfway house and personally much prefer a laptop indoors and a smart phone on my travels, so my knowledge & inteterest of their anatomy is rather vague! My point though was that suggesting staff simply walk around with a 'naked' tablet is a poor idea, the vulnerability of the devices being one of several reasons.
A naked tablet is a bad idea as youre right they would get knacked and smashed quickly but a 7" tablet would be perfect for the job if they could make it strong enough to suffer the abouse. I reckon a 64GB SD card could easily hold the fares database too I think.
I'd prefer it if it could just predict the winning numbers
Interestingly, like TheEdge - I heard some rumours about a new system today. These came from a conductor with another TOC, and he seemed to think that testing was imminent. Fully unsubstantiated of course, the railway rumour mill could well be up to its usual tricks!
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