Robin wrote:
I think so as to guard against people assuming they could collect
tickets from a particular (usually local) station only to find that that
station had no ticket machine. That situation used to be common (as I
discovered when in Suffolk a few years ago).

There were also types of ticket machines which were not online - ie the
station had a ticket machine, but of the simplistic 'press the button for
the ticket you want' type. So just having a ticket machine was not
sufficient.

I don't know if any of these survive, or if they are all online now.

Theo