Overpaying at a TVM

[TUC]

When attempting to buy a ticket at the TVM at Halifax station this morning I discovered that it was not accepting cards as payment so had to use cash. It was only after inserting £3.00 in coins and having them returned twice that I realised that when the machine was asking for £2.95, it really was only £2.95 it was going to accept and would not allow a minor overpayment.

I have no idea whether the TVM is usually able to give change but had run out of it, or whether it always insists on the exact payment. Either way, whilst I can see that it would be right for the machine to warn passengers that it cannot give change, I did find it odd and frustrating that it would not even allow someone to choose to overpay, especially when the overpayment was 5p!

Do TVMs generally refuse overpayments? (I usually pay by card so have never come across the issue before.)

As an aside, I noticed that the option for collecting pre-booked tickets was also greyed out, presumably because of the same problem with the card reader. It did leave me wondering, if the problem was also present last night when the ticket office was closed, what the position would have been in such circumstances for passengers unable to collect pre-booked tickets?

 

[bkhtele]

The principle is buy at the first opportunity. Re collection of tickets: collect en route or at destination - ideally showing evidence of collection code.most machines I have come across either give change or don't work - the technology is quite old. If there is a permit machine you should use it.

 

[causton]

Sounds like an S&B machine. And that sounds weird as usually if change was not available, on ours ones at least, it would take the entire cash payment option away! Other things, such as a faulty note/coin acceptor or vault would take either method away (so the machine would say "Cards or banknotes only" if it could not take coins).

In any case, this event would be added to a log so assuming Northern can handle email technology, they should be able to read that there is a problem with the machine so if a revenue officer came up they could verify the machine wasn't working, and other stations could get in touch with Northern or check their emails to see if the machine was faulty.

 

[Starmill]

I have had this problem at a Northern S&B machine before. Some lovely person had jammed some many tickets into the card reader (they have the ones that suck the card in for some reason) that it wasn't useable and there was no change available. Overpayments were not being accepted then either. This was at Manchester Oxford Road, same as TVMs as Halifax. The other TVM was out of order. The problem with them being vandalised or the screen freezing is that this doesn't always get recorded as a fault. Northern have replaced a few of these TVMs with ones which only accept cards.

 

[CyrusWuff]

Not sure about the S&B ones, but our ATOS/Shere FAST TVMs issue a "Short Change Voucher" if they can't dispense all your change. You then take that to a Ticket Office to exchange it for cash.