Did the PORTIS system used to overcharge?

[thenorthern]

Around 15 years ago when PORTIS and SPORTIS was in use I remember that it used to be that the price it charged was often incorrect in that it would charge more than the cost of turning up at the booking office ignoring any penalty fares or being charged the full fare for boarding without a ticket as I had boarded at an understaffed station.

Does anyone else remember this or am I thinking of something else?

 

[HH]

Never heard of this then or since and TBH can't see how it could happen outside human error, but I'm no expert on the machines. Maybe one of our longer serving guards can comment.

 

[LowLevel]

I suppose errors could creep in - machines were programmed for different routes in terms of holding local/popular fares (would obviously work differently for local or Intercity services - for example if I was working out of Manchester I might take Machine A which was programmed for Blackpool one day or machine B for South Manchester the next) and any fares required not held on the machine had to be worked out by the operator from a paper fares manual - if they got it wrong I suppose you could be overcharged.

 

[yorkie]

Around 15 years ago when PORTIS and SPORTIS was in use I remember that it used to be that the price it charged was often incorrect in that it would charge more than the cost of turning up at the booking office ignoring any penalty fares or being charged the full fare for boarding without a ticket as I had boarded at an understaffed station.

Does anyone else remember this or am I thinking of something else?

Longer distance fares had to be entered manually; this could result in the wrong price being charged.

The wrong price could have just as easily been lower as it could have been higher (sounds like you were unlucky!). This was human error.

 

[Andrew1395]

PORTIS (1986) and its successor SPORTIS (1988) had to be updated overnight when polling its sales data. If machines were not polled they would often miss updates. Of course their memory was quite small compared to the needs of the fares manual, and they had a subset of fares loaded tailored to the BR region they were allocated to. So many sales would require operators to calculate and create fares.