One of the first things that Silverlink did was install ticket gates at MK and Euston -followed by others such as Camden Road on the NLL to recoup some of the leaked revenue - with more following on - it made massive sense ! .......
Any enthusiasm for the reintroduction of platform tickets?!
Why not? A bit of extra revenue. On occasions I've asked to be let through to take a photograph or visit the cafe and it's usually been OK, but it can depend who's on duty. I remember platform tickets being 2 old pence and they were supposed to be valid for a hour, but we often stayed all day. Again it depended on the station staff.
I have a recollection of going through a passimeter at Camden Road in the late 60s. I suspect that it has always been a ace that leaked revenue.
They still exist. Which stations still sell them is another matter!
Can readily find pics online of Platform Tickets having been sold fairly recently at each of Leeds, Weston-super-Mare, Gravelly Hill and Newport (South Wales) stations, so there's four for starters. Price = 10p and it would seem that they're valid for 60 minutes.
One of the issues was with the low passenger numbers of a generation ago on the North London lines, there wasn't a huge amount of revenue to leak away in the first place, and it could be financially more worthwhile to dispense with the staff and accept that some revenue was not being taken. Over time the numbers there have boomed exponentially, and its a different balance now.
I steward in the museum at Didcot Railway Centre, where we have a platform ticket machine dating from c1910.
Wonderful that the old 1910 platform ticket machine is still operating. It's been more than 30 years since I was able to make regular forays to the Railway Centre.
Yes, it is ... and you'll be very welcome at the Centre!
Indeed, as I recall the Penalty Fares scheme as originally envisaged under Network SouthEast in the late 1980s and early 90s was intended to rely largely or solely on random checks on trains and revenue blocks at stations by revenue protection inspectors. That's how it works on many tram, metro/rapid transit and suburban rail networks in mainland Europe, and even on some networks in the UK such as London Trams and Manchester Metrolink, although to be effective and to prevent the fraudulent reuse of already used tickets, such a system either needs to have a time limit on single journey tickets (e.g. journeys having to start within 60 or 90 minutes of the time that the ticket was issued) or require tickets to be validated by inserting them into a validator. The latter has long been commonplace in mainland Europe but has only ever been used on a small number of networks in the UK.
The French are or were very big on ticket validators - as far back as 1978 I remember seeing posters about the need to "compostez votre billet", which created images of them being mulched into a heap of garden waste. That was platform machines on SNCF, but most of their trams have on-board validators, which I suspect is an invitation not to do so unless you see an inspector.
They were indeed, and probably still are on many of their bus, metro and tram networks, but SNCF abolished ticket validation ("compostage") for long distance journeys from the start of 2023 and it's being phased out for regional journeys as discussed in this thread:
www.railforums.co.uk
If they are anything like the German ones (or somewhere else - it’s a long time since I witnessed it) the validators are disabled when the inspectors get on. Presumably they take note of who has got on at the same stop and has therefore not had the opportunity to validate their ticket.
Maybe so, but would be difficult to police at a busy station with lots of people boarding.
OK - going back 20 years or so now - but the only German place of any size that didn’t have Entwerter back then was, IIRC, Hamburg - and of course they didn’t have trams either.
The validation of tickets is a very stupid idea that only Mainland Europe seems to have adopted. Tickets should be validated automatically when you buy them. I believe the idea is so you could buy multiple tickets at a time and then just validate them and use them when necessary. But i would not be surprised if one of the reasons so many cities do it is to make money out of tourists. Major cities like Prague and Budapest etc make thousands (or even millions in the case of some cities) a year from their gestapo ticket inspectors fining unaware foreign tourists who had no idea that you had to validate tickets. There are tens of thousands of reports online from all over Mainland Europe of foreign tourists being unfairly fined because they had no idea that you had to validate tickets. If you buy a ticket it should be valid straight away without need for validation. The date and time of purchase should be when it is valid from. This is how the UK and most places outside of Mainland Europe do it. Just buy a ticket when you need it and use it straight away. There is no need to buy lots in advance. This validation process is one thing that i absolutely hate about Mainland European public transport.
Compare the speed of loading of a tram in virtually any European city with a bus here and you’ll see why “buy before you board” is a sensible idea (particularly before it became practical to have onboard ticket machines). Since having ticket machines at every stop is not viable, in a pre-digital era, there needed to be a way of buying tickets in advance (and in bulk) for use at a later date - and thus a way of validating them at time of use. Validation also permits multi-mode single tickets with a time validity. No doubt no-one would invent such a system now but inertia is a very powerful force. Fleecing tourists who haven’t bothered to find out how a system works is way down the list of reasons….
It did exist, and was shown as a through service, although no single table in the GBTT covered the whole route so there were footnotes such as "continues to Glasgow, see table 51" and "from London Paddington, see Table 116")
