Great Western Coffee Shop

Hello. I'm new here so welcome to my profile. I have a theoretical question that I hope some of you can answer.

If a passenger boarded a train at a station with no ticket purchasing facilities or permit to travel machine and they were unable to find the guard, what should they do on alighting the train if that station only has a ticket vending machine? Should they purchase a ticket from that station to the station they boarded at? Is there a way to buy a ticket from the origin station on the ticket machine to the station where the ticket machine is at (the destination station)?

Hi, welcome to the forum.

This is unclear as technically it is not possible to purchase a ticket that covered the journey you made.  Additionally, the ticket you wish to purchase may not be available to buy from a TVM.  On some routes, the fares and time restrictions are different in opposite directions, which means you may not be able to pay the correct fare.

However, there are a few train operating companies who allow tickets to be purchased from a different origin.  Southern and former First Capital Connect stations offer this facility.  As far as I am aware, none of the different types of machines in use by FGW offer this.

At the end of the day, if there is a revenue block at the station, then you can puchase a ticket from the staff there (just like you would be able to do on board).  If there isn't a revenue block and no open ticket office, then you got a free journey...

Welcome to the forum ...

Yes  ;D

That seems a sensible an honourable pragmatic solution to the situation as you describe it.   Yet I'm interested in the background to your question and wonder if there's more to it ...

Noting Brucey's answer too - that's why I say "pragmatic" ...

And if, morally, you don't want to get a free journey then you could send the train operator a cheque!

Of course, the guard would appear on each platform that your train stopped at...so there might be a case to answer as to hiw & why you couldn't find the guard

165/166 trains are operated without a guard.  There are stations served by these trains without ticket purchasing facilities.

Hello all.

When I said unable to find the guard, I mean if it was a long train and the train was busy and if it was a short journey, it wouldn't have been possible to get past everyone to find the guard in time before the train arrived and if it had been impossible to get to the guard's door before they dispatched the train at the destination station. Like I said, it's a theoretical question but I imagine there's a procedure which passengers would have to follow.

With regards to approaching Revenue Protection Officers, as they are usually located as passengers leave the compulsory ticket area i.e. past the ticket vending machines, approaching them to purchase a ticket could be deemed as leaving the station without purchasing a ticket for the journey made.

If you've started your journey from a station with no facilities and have had no opportunity to purchase on board then, provided the first thing you ask the RPI's is "I need to buy a ticket", there's no way they could write you up for any offence.

Assuming the train had a guard, you could be expected to alight & walk along the train and board closer to the guard?...depends how far you are going

The answer re the TVM has been answered above. FGW din't have TVMs that can a ticket for a journey starting at sny station other than the one it is at/on.

No obligation to do that.

Thank you for all of your replies. I'm hoping to be a Revenue Protection Officer, so I'm trying to learn as much as possible before applying for the role.

And the follow on is that people deem there is no obligation to ever buy a ticket.

People may well deem they have no obligation to buy a ticket but that's breaking the law.

Failing to seek out the guard isn't.

A few years ago I travelled from Gt Bedwyn to Paddington as part of a group.  We wanted to buy groupsave tickets, but the Guard (or whatever (s)he was called never ventured up the train to check tickets so we got to Paddington on Platform 8 (no barrier) and had to try and find someone who would sell us groupsave tickets from Gt Bedwyn to Padd (return).  Not sure there was a TVM at Gt Bedwyn then, but even so I doubt it would have sold groupsave.

I fail to see why passengers should have to go to so much trouble to pay for their journey.  B&Q, Sainsbury's, Waitrose, Morrisons, Tesco all seem to manage to provide a means of paying for their goods at a convenient location on the way out.  Even when they are robots they provide someone to come and intervene if the human cannot get the robot to work. 

So why are rail operators allowed to use criminal sanctions when they lamentably fail to give their customers an opportunity to pay. 

Revenue Protection is an emotive subject ... and threads tend to move on from the specific questions as asked to more general discussions.  I have to admit I tend to go along with that - not fighting shy of a subject which can get very emotional, especially where grey areas exist as at the start of this thread, and with the best will in the world it's unreasonable (but I suspect the law) to expect every passenger to know what to do in every unusual circumstance.

There should be clear, prompt fearless and easy ways for customers to pay for their travel, with "fearless", "clear" and "easy" applying to customers who purchase on the day as well as in advance, and applying to customers who don't or can't fully understand the system as well as the tiny minority who study boards like this one.  I'm thinking of the visitor from overseas, and the less able / communicative amongst our resident population too.   We're getting very good at helping those with physical health issues we can see; we can still be pretty unthinking about people with mental health issues who can have real problems with ticketing - I suspect we may be getting better, but we're not really there yet.

Failure to provide such a means to pay on 100% of journeys is understandable, as with a transport system you're looking at something where the very purpose is to have huge numbers of entrances and exits in different places, and routinely with very long opening hours.  But in the case of such a failure to provide a clear, prompt and easy (to each traveller) means to pay, perhaps it should be the railway's loss rather than the customer's fault in law.

Where the means is provided, as I've outlined above, but intentionally not taken up then - yes - revenue should be "protected"; I'm fully in support of that, with effective measures to enforce it.

I would have thought that the passenger has the obligation to pay at the first reasonable opportunity (and that would, in my judgement include making reasonable attempts to find a guard at least so far as the passenger has the mobility etc needed to find the guard).  If no such reasonable opportunity is presented to the passenger then that is the ToCs loss.  I would expect Revenue Protection Officers to direct their powers against those who are deliberately attempting to travel without payment.  I think that you will find enough of them to be going on with when you start your job. 

In practice, I think that this kind of situation often comes down to a question of who speaks first.  If the RPO challenges the passenger and only hears the excuses about not having a ticket (however valid those excuses may be) after they have been challenged then the passenger will have a very weak case that their intention was to buy a ticket at the first opportunity.




Edit note: Quote marks fixed, for clarity. CfN