"Neil Williams" wrote in message
oups.com...
Richard M Willis wrote:

Why does routine payment of a PF constitute evidence for prosecution ?
There's no law against deliberately paying a PF and doing so every
journey.

There is; the railway byelaws require the purchase of a ticket before
starting the journey unless no opportunity is available to do so. This
makes an utter nonsense of the whole concept of PFs.

Can you give a citation for this ?

I have been repeatedly and explicitly told by PF inspectors and the
like that you can board a train purposely without purchasing a ticket
as long as you have no INTENTION to defraud, and are prepared to
pay the PF (which I am).

If what you say is true, then it is indeed a nonsense situation: we should
not have the situation where someone has breached the law and they can
escape prosecution simply by paying for a (more expensive) ticket.
If you contravene the law, you should be prosecuted. There should not
be two ways about it.

I wish they'd barrier the whole damn network and make ticket-purchasing
universal. (i.e. you can get ANY ticket FROM any station TO any station,
including all the weird combinations/addons/conditions you can get now.

Far better would be just to engineer potential for fraud out of the network
so we wouldn't need (so many) ticket checks. I don't know how they'd do
this,
however.

Richard [in SG19]



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