Paul Weaver wrote:
MIG wrote:
the bridge to Waterloo Main, where there are still machines and an almost permanent
squad of checkers

In peak hours perhaps, I rarely see any checkers.

Which really chimes in with what others have said about the train
companies only checking tickets of people who are likely to pay, rather
than actually doing the difficult stuff of checking tickets in the
evenings and at weekends, when you're more likely to get irregular
travellers who are more likely not to have a ticket and more likely to
be violent/aggressive.

Waterloo East is a classic example; there are always squads of
inspectors in the morning peak, and never at any other time. Ditto
Feltham, where I complete my journey - inspectors in the morning and
evening peaks, but travel at any other time and the gates are wide
open.

Patrick

On 13 Apr 2006 01:44:12 -0700, wrote:

Waterloo East is a classic example; there are always squads of
inspectors in the morning peak, and never at any other time. Ditto
Feltham, where I complete my journey - inspectors in the morning and
evening peaks, but travel at any other time and the gates are wide
open.

I've used it on Saturdays a couple of times - mainly so I can use my
London Stations season ticket to get to London Bridge rather than pay
for the tube - and on both recent occasions there have been
inspectors.

One thing that occurs to me is - why don't they make different sorts
of season tickets more obviously different? If you wave something
vaguely gold coloured at them they don't tend to look closer. If mine
had RAIL ONLY stamped on it in big letters it would help ticket
checkers, you could do something similar with zonal tickets.

On Thu, 13 Apr 2006 08:18:26 GMT, Phil Clark
wrote:

So presumably, at some time the description for Tuesday's journey will
change to "Green Park - Unfinished" and I can ask to have it resolved
- but I'm slightly surprised that it doesn't seem to charge you a
default ODTC price on an unresolved journey.

I can see why they still only charge the minimum fare - pre-pay is
still in a fairly introductory phase, and it's very easy to pick up an
unresolved journey (or even two unresolved journeys per one real
journey) until you learn from your mistakes and get a better idea of
how the system works. Plus there's the fact that they refuse point
blank to fix unresolved journeys on unregistered cards[1], so if
people were stuck with large penalties they couldn't have refunded, it
would create negative publicity that they could do without.

[1] Except at Tube ticket offices, but they can only resolve the most
recent journey on the card.

Barry Salter wrote:
On Thu, 13 Apr 2006 09:01:11 GMT, Phil Clark
wrote:

One thing that occurs to me is - why don't they make different sorts
of season tickets more obviously different? If you wave something
vaguely gold coloured at them they don't tend to look closer. If mine
had RAIL ONLY stamped on it in big letters it would help ticket
checkers, you could do something similar with zonal tickets.

There are six basic types of Season ticket blank in use, as follows:

Weekly Rail Only : Green, with "Double Arrow" logo bottom left, "Season"
bottom right

Other Than Weekly (OTW) Rail Only : Grey, as above

OTW Travelcard : Blue, Travelcard and "Double Arrow" and "Roundel" logos
at top, graduated Blue Pyramid design

Weekly Travelcard : Green, design as OTW Travelcard

Annual Gold Card Travelcard : "Gold" coloured, as above, but with
"ANNUAL Gold Card" overprint at bottom

Annual Gold Card Season : "Double Arrow" logo top left, "ANNUAL Gold
Card" overprint at bottom.

There are also "DUPLICATE" and "REPLACEMENT" versions of most of the
above, with the relevant text overprinted at the bottom of the ticket.


When I get a weekly travelcard at the same station, there must be
different machines at each counter because they use a different style
of printing and a different blank, sometimes green and sometimes orange
top and bottom.