Richard M Willis wrote:

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).

http://www.arrivatrainswales.co.uk/u...ments/1263.pdf

Section 17.1 should do it:-

"17. Compulsory Ticket Areas
(1) No person shall enter a compulsory ticket area on the railway
unless he has with him a valid ticket."

or 18.1:-

"18. Ticketless travel in non-compulsory ticket areas
(1) In any area not dedicated as a compulsory ticket area, no person
shall enter any train for the purpose of travelling on the railway
unless he has with him a valid ticket entitling him to travel."

However, it seems there may be a mitigation, in that both sections
contain a list of exceptions to the rule, in that...

"No person shall be in breach of [either of these] if;
- there were no facilities in order for the issue or validation of
any[1] ticket at the time when, and at the station where, he began his
journey; or
- there was a notice at the station where he began his journey
permitting journeys to be started without a valid ticket; or
- an authorised person gave him permission to travel without a valid
ticket".

I suppose that the third point above would mean you could travel and
pay the PF legally only if you asked permission to do so before either
boarding or entering the Compulsory Ticket Area, as applicable.

[1] I don't like the wording of this bit, as it implies that if there's
a machine selling tickets in the opposite direction to the way you're
going, or not selling Railcard tickets, or not accepting notes for a
large fare etc, it isn't reasonable to pay on the train. This is
rather silly, unless of course you are Nederlandse Spoorwegen.

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.

Agreed. I would personally rather, however, that they decriminalised
ticketless travel and enforced it in a similar way to parking offences.

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.

You should be able to get any ticket from any station that has a fares
manual and an APTIS (or the more modern versions), give or take
PTE-area tickets on dedicated manually-issued stock. Simplification
would be better, though; there is no need for the hundreds of ticket
types that exist at present.

The trouble is unstaffed stations and paying on board, where this isn't
necessarily the case. You couldn't feasibly barrier everywhere - what
about Altnabreac in Scotland, that gets a passenger per week or so?

Neil