On Jul 3, 5:44*pm, Martin Petrov wrote:

On 3 July, 15:45, Mizter T wrote:

On Jul 3, 3:16*pm, Martin Petrov wrote:

[BIG snip]

There. I've got all that off my chest.

And don't get me started on the behaviour of the revenue protection
officers on WAGN during the early part of this decade (when I used to
work in Hertford) - I had a number of run-ins with those a##holes.
(and never once was my ticket invalid - their general attitude was
disgusting)

I've certainly seen RPIs who seem to have attitude problems. I have,
to be fair, seen many others who don't seem to take such obvious
gratification in 'catching their prey' - taking some quiet
satisfaction is one thing, but I can certainly see how those with a
swaggering attitude can gets on people's goats. The best attitude is
just to calmly take it all in ones stride.

(The "calmly take it all in ones stride" point above was directed at
how the RPIs should do their jobs, BTW - though I suppose the same
advice might as well apply to someone being subjected to an RPI
inquisition.)


Lots of very fair points, as I would expect from the esteemed
poster

My real beef is that it has often looked as though WAGN (and probably
others) have made it as difficult as possible to actually buy a ticket
(very very poor ticket machines which were slow as hell, unintuitive
and liable to swallow your card, combined with largely unstaffed
stations), and refusing allow people to buy their tickets on the
train.

When I lived back up north, the norm on north west trains was that
there would be a guard on all trains who would sell you a ticket on
the train, no questions asked (maybe it's not any more, but it seemed
to work well enough then) - this seemed like a perfectly sensible
option, and to see such poor facilities combined with aggressive and
nasty staff who would give no leeway in the event of queues at the
ticket office or ticket machines (and honestly, I wouldn't have been
too happy to have to put my card in the machines....) I know there has
to be some sort of deterrent to fare dodgers, but the zero tolerance
approach can leave a bad taste in the event of genuinely
understandable circumstances.

Cripes... well, you're touching on an awful lot of issues there. I
agree that it seems the TOCs sometimes seem to want to play it both
ways. The more general point about compulsory ticket areas - aka
Penalty Fares areas - well, they're a fairly well established concept.
I'm not sure if London Underground implementing this pre-dates British
Rail - perhaps someone can help with the history.

The argument in favour is I suppose that situation is meant to be
unambiguous (i.e. buy ticket before travelling) - and given the busy
and at peak times rather crowded nature of suburban rail services in
and around London, I don't think the 'pay train' concept - that's
paying a conductor/guard on board - would be remotely workable in most
cases. Indeed I don't think it ever really was adopted - even
stretching back in history - apart from on a few lines such as the
'Goblin', where UIVMM 'pay on train' was in place until LO took over
and equipped stations with ticket machines - not sure if there are
Permit to Travel machines there too but I don't think so.

(SWT's Hounslow Loop line was also excluded from the PF scheme until
quite recently - but my experience was that guard's didn't really seem
to go in for doing 'revenue duties' aka selling tickets on board -
what were others experiences?)