Great Western Coffee Shop

I was going to post this in some other thread - but what came out of the 'search' facility was so old that it makes more sense to start a new one.

My question is about what the arrangements are if you have pre-booked tickets but there's no TVM at your starting station.

I was at Heysham Harbour yesterday, and there were four Canadian tourists boarding the Northern train to Lancaster, to change there onto a West Coast service to Glasgow. They'd got bookings that they'd done through RailEurope. They printed off the emails giving them instructions - but (not unsurprisingly) there's no TVM at Heysham. The conductor on the train wasn't very helpful : though he did allow them to travel, there was a long-winded exposition about how he shouldn't.

I did my good deed for the day and took the tourists under my wing. At Lancaster we scampered upstairs to the ticket office, picked up two lots of seven tickets with the right credit cards and reference numbers. Crossed to the other platform (and they had serious luggage!), and walked all the way to the Carlisle end of the platform (reservations in coach B of a Pendolino). And all of this in the eleven minutes that they had for their connection!

So, what should we have done? Were they entitled to travel as long as they'd printed out the confirmation emails? The previous thread (2010) suggests that the answer is "yes".

It may well have been covered ... but our search facility ain't brilliant and it's a "live with" at the moment.

If you have pre booked tickets, you are required to have them in your possession before you start your journey. You can get them delivered by post, or pick them up in advance from another station with a machine. I know this only too well, having helped people countless times in the past who pre booked tickets from Melksham only to find they had to travel to another station in order to pick them up before they could start their journey.  Thank goodness we have a TVM now!

OK - that was the official line.   In practise, I've not seen travel being denied to people who have a printout of their ticket and will be collecting as your group did at the first available opportunity.   I would suspect that if someone tried this on a systemic or regular basis, discression would be reduced ...

Thanks for that.

I have to say that the conductor wasn't strong on customer service.

I've since had an email from the Canadians - they got to Glasgow without any incident, but no-one from Virgin bothered to check the tickets!

I've had the same problem. Often solved by using Google. Type your query, leave a space then "site:http://www.firstgreatwestern.info/" without the quotation marks. Alternatively, selecting Settings, Advanced Search then enter http://www.firstgreatwestern.info/ into the "Site or Domain" box will do the same thing.

The issue with collecting tickets should somewhat lessen as we move towards E-ticket and other technologies away from paper and magnetic strips.  If use of printouts was routinely allowed though, it would open the door to certain opportunities for fraudulent travel, so perhaps discression is the best interim solution.   But staff should, indeed, always be aware that the people who get 'caught' by this are often the ones who are ones who rarely use the UK trains, may be nervous, and on whom they should employ their best ambassadorial skills.

The issue with searching - yes, I agree - Google's far better than our built in search. The anticipation when the forum was set up was that it wasn't that we would ever be looking forward to our tenth birthday, and there's a few things showing their age which aren't trivial to upgrade.

I have seem some sites with a search with google button.

That's at cost to the site owner based on the number of pages indexed. I have looked at it, but it would be a significant cost for the Coffee Shop.

A very good reason not to do it then.

It does, however, trouble me that we don't offer a good search, and it's something I've played with.  Take a look at http://www.wellho.net/demo/csp.php and you'll find you can put in a single word and search through all public posts for that word, with a report given back to you on the threads that contain that word, most recently posted first in the result set.   At this stage it comes with a list of limitations that make the easement list look short, but it may help sometimes.

P.S.  You can also use "%" and "_" in the search for "anything" and "any one character".

Any good Business works its solutions around its customers - if a ticket machine isn't available at the station of choice, a printout should suffice - the default position should be that customers, whether regulars or not, are honest - after all FGW counts on the same expectation from its customers (and is not always justified).

But would it be fair to expect collection even at Lancaster, with only 11mins with luggage? I could understand that couple thinking time wasn't on their side.

I can also see why TOCs don't offer flexibility per se, simoly coz there are too many permutations as here as to why the might have travelled all the way without collection.

Frankly, RailEurope were at fault as they should know there's no TVM so should have insisted that they were mailed.

I'm trying to email them - but their 'contact us' form hasn't produced a reply yet.

Allegedly STARmobile (an Avantix replacement) has the ability to print TOD. 

If TOCs allow that ability in the version they purchase.