Richard M Willis wrote:

b) This implicit connexion between "not paying yet", "evading" and "penalty"
were broken.

Why? The whole *idea* of a Penalty Fare is to avoid that distinction
needing to be made. If you are going to make it, you may as well be
lenient on those unable to pay before their journey and just charge
them an Open Single, just as you do in non-PF areas. Unless, of
course, the railway likes to be deliberately customer-unfriendly, in
which case it would do well to revise that thinking.

That may not be the principle on which they were sneaked through
Parliament, but it is the only good reason to have them. The PF rate
and inspection frequency can be set at a level whereby the railway does
not make a loss from ticketless travel, which itself could then be
decriminalised just as parking is in most places.

Or we could go down the route of making it a legal requirement to prepay for
your whole journey. This would require all ticket offices everywhere to be
able
to issue every combination of ticket to/from/via/date/time and for unmanned
stations
to be abolished.

Or take the Nederlandse Spoorwegen route and have ticket machines to
fulfil that purpose, and require their use. Unlike NS, however, if we
did go that route I'd like to see them accepting all types of credit
card plus all types of cash (barring perhaps 50 quid notes). The
technology exists, including to give change in notes. There is
absolutely no reason whatsoever why such a machine shouldn't issue all
tickets of all types for walk-on travel, and perhaps even (using a
Trainline-style interface) advance purchase as well.

I think that realistically we'd still need PayTrain routes and
stations, the latter to take account of places like Cheddington on main
lines that just couldn't justify a ticket office open for the full
service period. They could be clearly indicated as such, like they
were in some areas during BR days.

Neil