The guard opens and closes the door. Between stations he goes to the rear cab and reads a Dan Brown novel which he was carrying in his hand when opening/closing the doors. When we get to Piccadilly hardly anyone has a ticket. Cue a 20 minute wait - longer than the journey - to buy a ticket and get through the ticket barriers. I miss my connection - a replacement bus service.
There does seem to be an issue with long queues to buy tickets coming off busy services on a saturday .
I do not work on any part of the railway so maybe I'm missing something. Why wasn't the guard selling tickets?
There are many reasons for why not , some legitimate some not so legitimate . Without asking the guard we will never know which it was
Not legitimate ones include things like cannot be bothered or didn't bother collecting a machine when booking on , unfortunately just like any other job which employs humans some people will do their job with more enthusiasm and better than others . Its frustrating for those of us in the grade fighting for our future that some are like this .
Legitimate ones include things like issues with the ticket machine the guard cannot rectify on route , lack of ticket machine to collect when booking on or carrying out some other duty such as trying to contact control about a unit fault or because of delays disruption on route.Overcrowding is another one which prevents you from doing revenue . For me personally if there is no revenue equipment available at the start of your shift or it breaks early on it can actually make your shift really boring just doing door duties and occasional patrols your whole shift .
Even in those cases as a I will always make an announcement every few stops to give some reason why even if its just a generic technical fault with my machine and to apologize for the inconvenience , and I would still patrol the train if possible every so often to check that there are no other issues on board , admittedly on a single pacer patrolling the train is kind of negated by the fact that you can see the whole train from either end but a walk through still shows a presence .
Thanks for the replies. Do ticket machines often break down? If so why isn't this addressed?
I arrived at my destination about half an hour late because the next bus was early. It took 2 hours and 29 minutes to get from my home near Woodley - with a frequent bus service right outside the door directly to the station- to Bolton, 24 miles away (according to Alexa). That's 9 miles an hour! I like public transport but getting from one part of Greater Manchester to the other is bizarre.
Ticket machines dont often break down ,a lot of basic faults can be rectified by the user but this depends on the users skill level and motivation to do so . On longer shifts the battery can run out before the end either on the main ticket machine or the chip and pin device , and you can run out of ticket stock for the machine which obviously prevents selling .
Ahh yeah that jorney made all the more difficult by the fact that bolton is closed at weekends for some time now .