Great Western Coffee Shop

Important to remember, anyone travelling this Christmas, that TOCs often lift their ticket restrictions over the festive period.

GWR
All restrictions lifted Fri 23 Dec - Mon 02 Jan inclusive, except Advance tickets.
Weekend First available Sat 24 Dec - 02 Jan inclusive.

Crosscountry
Peak restrictions lifted Sat 24 Dec - Mon 2 Jan inclusive.
Weekend First available throughout this period.

Chiltern
All restrictions lifted Sun 25 Dec - Sun 1 Jan inclusive.

Railcards can be used all day, however minimum fares still apply for 16-25 & HMF railcards.

NOTE:  TVMs will still sell you peak restricted tickets during this time.

Hence my request to TOCs to at least put notices up on/by their TVMs to alert customers that restrictions are lifted and to use ticket offices before 10am.

This really is inexcusable.   Putting stickers on machines is not the answer.  The answer is having ticket machines and a fares system that is fit for purpose

Sorry, I don't agree.

In a perfect world, yes. But the £millions required to re-programme the TVMs and update them before & after - no chance. They'd simply revert to not lifting the restrictions. Many shops don't reprice their goods in a weekend sale =- simply put a bright tag on those items with a xx% off.

If I was writing a spec for the software I would require some sort of software switch so that it did not cost £millions to reprogramme.

I can see part of the argument for GWR and other TOCS allowing off peak tickets all day on Friday - but then they warn the trains will be busy.

Would it not be better to have normal restrictions on the Friday to control demand, or allow the cheaper tickets on the 22nd as well to spread the load?

quite.  Surely it is not beyond the wit of man to have software that costs less to reprogram a restriction and have it sent down the wire to every single TVM in a second than the cost of sending out thousands of stickers to hundreds of stations.

Each ticket office can print their own....

You have to accept that the technology in these things is ancient. Upgrades are needed, but would cost £millions more to renew. Are you willing to pay for these through your taxes?

I suspect the cost has probably been more than covered already by the number of people who have been duped by this ancient tech into paying more than they need to. The cynic in me wonders why the industry is so reluctant to update...hmmmm. DfT could just force the issue if they had any balls/teeth.

I don't think it should take too much to do as the program controlling the machines already knows when the Saturdays and Sundays are, when it's off peak all day. You never know we could be pleasently surprised come Friday morning, but I'm not holding my breath!

I do know that the ticket machines in the ticket offices are showing the off peak fares on all trains on friday

Well the ticket vending machines are relatively new (the ones in Bath have been through 3 generations in the last 15 years) and have allowed the ToCs to make massive savings in terms of staff cuts. 

Its not a question of money it is a question of competence.  If ToC management were forced to get their act together they would, but at the moment we have a set up that makes it easier for them to think up excuses than to treat the customer fairly and a lame Government/regulator who nods along.  Now if we had a proper regulator who started throwing a few multimillion pound fines around I am sure you would find that the impossible suddenly becomes possible and affordable.  It is simply a question of incentives.  At the moment the Tocs are incentivised to miss sell expensive tickets so they do.   

It absolutely isn't ancient. The ticket machine at Charlbury, which isn't a particularly new one, is newer than the server I have running behind me right now - which runs the latest stable version of Ubuntu very happily indeed. It's a procurement failure, not a technology issue.

(And given that the server in question performs massive routing tasks, it's not that far-flung a comparison!)

That's very true.  The pollution fines for water companies used to be typically around £25k and it had little effect.  Now they start at around £250k and last week one company was fined £2million. And now preventing pollution is a priority. 

Of course the difficulty is that DfT want companies to maximise their fare income because that allows them to get higher premiums (or make lower payments) for franchises. So DfT are not interested in fair fares. 

I think you'll find the system it runs is very ancient - still using Windows XP or very best W7.....coz the programs it is running won't run on anything more modern.

Yes, I fear that DfT has allowed itself to view everything as part of a money-go-round.  So if they force change X on the ToC, it will cost the ToC £Y and their premium payment will be reduced by £Y.  The water companies were the same.  "if you force us to do X we will need to raise our water bills by £Y" they said.  But once X was forced upon them, they discovered that water bills only needed to rise by £Y-Z where Z is the efficiency saving that they are incentivised to find when it is their money rather than just a cost that gets passed straight down the line.

Force the ticket machines to be reprogrammed and you would soon find that the cost fell from ChrisB's "£millions" and that they find someone who can remember how to use Windows XP and will do the job for a few grand Christmas bonus. 

Scheidt & Bachmann Ticket XPress machines, the most common TVM across the UK, are regularly updated by their maintenance contractors. For many TOCs this service is contracted to Telent.

From what I can gather, most were updated to Windows 10 during 2016.

And as I have said before the software used by DB is much better.

Don't disagree. Tell the RDG that, they're the ones (was ATOC) that would have to agree to update all the TVMs

The operating system is usually no guide to the age of the program software.

I'm running Avantix Traveller 1.7.24.0 under Windows 10 here (it says copyright to 2016). But the README file that comes with it says that it's only supported if you're running it under Windows 7. It comes with a .HLP file that will only run under Windows Vista, 7, 8 or 8.1.

And there's the rub.

Developers won't program in anything unsupported. So operating systems would need updating, and the hardware would need to be able to run current operating systems. W10 needs a lot more RAM than WXP or W7.

So you almost may as well buy new

I'm sure what's involved is a pretty minor change inside the TVM's application, and nothing to do with the OS, or whether the app will run under it. But organising that is far less simple, as can be seen below:

If you want to know what fares data looks like, you can sign up to a free licence and get some. RDG do give a little information on this (http://data.atoc.org/fares-data), though the document defining the file formats of these "RJIS Datafeeds Interface Specification For Fares and Associated Data" is an ATOC one dated 2004. This says the two main fares data files are 100MB and 50MB, and the restriction file is 475 kB (or they were then).

Of course that's not what gets downloaded onto a TVM; it will be digested into something more specific. But no doubt the applications running in the machines were designed together with the pre-processing with that form of data as part of the specification. That definition knows nothing about ticket types - they are just specific values of data fields. Time restrictions are dealt with via restriction codes (the same codes you see on a ticket, surely). Each restriction code leads to a list of atomic restrictions, and one field in some of those (date band and calendar records) is a length-7 field called DAYS:

So if the TVM application applies that based on the true day-of-the-week value, nothing in its downloaded data tables can alter that. It would need changed software in all TVMs so the DAYS data is be redefined as the "applied day value" and some new data field introduced to say how to derive this applied day from the true date (not just day-of-the-week).

That doesn't sound too hard, and if that field itself is unchanged then unmodified machines would simply ignore the change. But the fact that the definition is so old suggests that it's not something RDG would undertake lightly. Are they justified? I really don't know. But the "who's going to have to do what?" question is likely to be important.