Great Western Coffee Shop

Columnist Philip Hensher in The Independent

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/philip-hensher/philip-hensher-a-train-company-that-turns-passengers-into-victims-790895.html (http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/philip-hensher/philip-hensher-a-train-company-that-turns-passengers-into-victims-790895.html)

I wouldn't really say Exeter-London was particularly bad, unless travelling on a train from Penzance which is likely to be packed.

Once again, people are forgetting the Chiltern Railways success! Thanks to competition, 70% more people are now using rail- Virgin have not suffered.

I did not like his comment about the guard telling you off if you have not bought a ticket. Grrrrrr.... it is called fare dodging mate- and yes, it is illegal!!!!

Its worth remembering that there is another side to the Chiltern story...........Certainly one for the many DfT fans among our forum membership  ;D

sorry matey most of that money was earmarked before she stuck her nose in!


your on about supersavers eh! I am right in saying that all the train operators done away with these?


those who snap up all the cheap tickets your moaning about you fool!


serves you right. Read the buy before you ride leaflet and once again you will see that this a railway by-law that goes right across the land. BTW I wonder have you met Bristol Train Manager who go'es by the nickname of Rockey? If not you don't know what a telling off is  ;D

Get a life and do some reporting on something intresting like watching grass grow. We've heard it all before and it's starting to get boring now!

I think there would be at least 3times the amount of moaning about it ;D

Exactly, it is illegal!

And it applies on all TOC's! NXEC are the probably the most strict on this issue!

So NXEC should be, IIRC all stations served by NXEC are staffed, so anyone travelling without a Ticket is try to get away with a free ride.

And so FGW should from all manned stations!

This is where the reail companies and HONEST passengers differ - I can think of a number of reasons why you plan to arrive in plenty of  time for the train you HAVE to catch


i.e. Friday I left in plenty of time to catch the 0632 - a mysterious set of road works appeared which are not the councils website and which involve a diversion that added 15 minutes to my journey.  I was coming down the wrong side of the severn when the 0632 went over the bridge heading into foregate street.  I ran three red lights and made the station just as the 0632 was coming in.  I have a season ticket - however if I had left the house with 20 minutes to spare (I usually aim to be there 5 minutes in advance bearing in mind I have a season) to buy a ticket - I would have not had time to buy said ticket and catch train.  the next one is an hour later.

Had I not had a ticket I would have had no choice but to board said train without a ticket .  My intention would not, however, have been to fair dodge.

In life s**t happens - the attitude displayed above does not allow for this!

Maybe not, but it's one of those things, if you go overdrawn when it's not your fault, you still get charged, at the end of the day, the passenger knows the risk before boarding the train, and they still take the chance, thats up to them!

My daughter frequently travels from Pershore to Paddington and always buys a ticket on the train - you can't buy a ticket at the station because there is no ticket machine due to lack of investment by FGW.

On the one occasion she returned from London without a return ticket she jumped on the train at platform 9 and expected to buy the ticket in exactly the same way she normally does.

The ticket inspector charged her a penalty fare and treated her like a criminal.

No she wasn't trying to cheat, she believed she was doing the right thing. FGW expect customers to cut them some slack with a timetable that should be filed under fiction, the very least they should do is allow a little leeway in the other direction.

Anyone with an ounce of common sense and a true understanding of customer service would have put her straight on that occasion but no - she now uses Chiltern and FGW have lost a customer for ever.

I completely sympathise (I have had plenty of similar experiences- those bloo*y roadworks!), but you have to see it from the guard's perspective. As far as they are concerned, anyone who boards a train without a ticket where they could have should pay the penalty.

It is just really tough luck!

Luckily I also have a season!

Hang on- she is in the wrong- she boarded a train at a station with ticket facilities (London for heavens sake).

She did not buy a ticket- therefore the guard had to assume she was fare dodging. Why would someone not buy a ticket.

If you are in a hurry- it is bad luck. But really you should!

PS- don't moan at me- they are the rules!

I'm not saying she was in the right, she didn't know the rules, and no she doesn't read the buy before you ride leaflet like 99.9999% of the passengers.

Why would someone would not buy a ticket? Easy, because in the past they always bought one on the train! She had never traveled from anywhere other than Pershore where you can't buy a ticket.

I wasn't moaning at you, merely making an observation.

It of course doesn't help when TOC's act in different ways. Purely to the times I need to go to work/come home from work, I invariably end up on a XC service (still use FGW a lot though   :) ) and they allow people to buy tickets on board, no questions asked. Never seen anyone given any penalty fare talk or anything.

Now, I know how long it takes me to get to the station from my house. Why would it be my fault if there were an accident and, on the rare occasion I didn't have a valid season, I needed to buy a ticket on the train? Why should I have to pay a penalty fair? Okay, I fully understand that some people use the whole "oh, I left in plenty of time but my cat died and then the dog ate my homework" story, but this goes down the line of punishing the majority for the sins of the minority.

That said, I do travel regularly and I understand and accept the needs of TOCs and I fully accept and even support FGW in protecting their revenue (and all other TOCs that participate in the penalty fair scheme). BUT - if I were an infrequent traveller that normally got the 0803 XC from Newton Abbot to Exeter and needed to get to work slightly early one day and decided to get the 0730 FGW service and arrived late, I would thin "oh, it's ok, I'll get my ticket on the train, that way, I would be late" only to find, low and behold, it cost me a small fortune. Does that win an award for longest most convoluted sentence??? I blame cider  :D

So, I do understand both sides of the story here. I lived in Poland for a year. The system there is that if you don't buy before you board, you go to the front of the train to the guard and buy a ticket there. You pay a 50p supplement for buying on board (in Polish terms, that's a lot but better than the penalty for no ticket). They then have spot checks from inspectors (scarier than nightclub bouncers) and no valid ticket = on the spot fine with all details taken (one bonus of ID cards here) payable at Post Offices. If there were no self service machines late at night, no on-board excess was charged - likewise if many people were saying it was broken. Far better then the blanketing discriminatory penalty fares

I think you can't really win if you try to use excuses when you have boarded a train at Paddington.

2 ticket offices, one of which is 24 hour, one of which is in front of Platform 9.
And various machines round the station.

Exactly.


Very good system- differentiates between those who want to buy a ticket, and those who "will if the guard checks."

Could be implemented at the buffet. ???

Hi Ollie,

My point was that she had no malicious intent, she merely didn't know the rules. If she had known she would have bought a ticket at the station she simply thought it was FGW policy to sell tickets on the train. Well it is, but only when it suits them!

Anyway it worked out for the best, she now travels from Warwick and far prefers Chiltern, they are far more reliable, far more regular and significantly cheaper.

Given that she travels 6 to 8 times a month and the incident happened a couple of years ago FGW have lost over ^4,000 of revenue. She has also recommended Chiltern to her friends who now also use it so you can easily double that number. I know you don't really give a damn about revenue?

Various enforcement agencies use an amount of discretion, the Guard could have used a degree of tact rather than conflict but it's your business not mine. If FGW choose to antagonize customers so be it. If the objective was revenue retention it failed, if the objective was customer satisfaction it failed. Believe me FGW is the loser.

There are reasons sites like thirdratewestern, I hate First Great Western etc exist. Treating  customers as criminals is one good reason.

You will find that most of those sites focus on punctuality and not the issue of penalty fares.
Was your daughter penalty fare or asked to pay for a full price single?

In all fairness Paddington's main screens which has a bit for notices state that a penalty fare scheme is in operation, and there are or were last time I checked notices about Penalty fares.

FGW don't just enforce it when they feel like it. If there isn't a way of buying a ticket, you are not liable for penalty fare. At Paddington you don't come under this category.

I think you will find that most T/Ms will allow some degree of discretion but as Ollie rightly said at Paddington probably not as there are ample opportunities to purchase a ticket.
Not knowing the rules is not a defence in any situation, its all clearly written down in The National Conditions of Carriage.

In Germany you get prosecuted if you get on without a ticket! and everyone always says how wonderful Germanys railways are, as for charging up on the train, everyone should be treated the same, the guard cant rightly charge one person up for not buying a ticket at the station, and then let the next person off just because they have a different excuse! If it was me running late and I got to the station then I would go straight to the guard and explain my situation, or seek him/her out when I got on the train, if someone is late and they jump on at the last minute and they make the effort to come and find me then i'll issue the cheaper fare, if they just go and sit down then I charge them the appropriate full fare with no discounts.

How long have they been calling at Pershore? ;D

I agree Vacman, everyone should be treated the same.  But if the rules should be the same with every TOC and enforced the same (or else it can confuse people). 

There are plenty of countries (Italy for example) where if you buy your ticket on the train rather than at the station ebfore boarding you pay a penalty.  Except they don't call it a penalty.  They call it a "commision".  It is about ^15 and goes (I think) straight to the guard.  This means that deliberate fraudsters end up paying more. People who make a genuine mistake also pay more don't get made to feel like they are criminals, which some people will take very personally and be so offended that they are put off using that TOC.

 ;D ;D ;D

It is interesting to note that Chiltern have more than doubled passenger numbers since they took over (some sources claim +70%!).

How many of these, do you think, have come from FGW at Bicester or Banbury (for Thames Valley), and Warwick Parkway (for Cotswolds)?

I would imagine a large proportion!

But: if the proposals for the line from Princes Risborough to Oxford happen (or a chord at Bicester allowing ex London trains to run to Oxford via Islip), I expect a hell of a lot more will go!

Penalty fares are however intended as a deterrant, it cost's FGW about ^10 to process a penalty fare so in some cases they loose money, every country/TOC does things differently, technicly you are breaking the law if you board a train without a valid ticket from a station where ticket issuing facilities were availiable, according to Byelaw 18(1).

But surely they won't have too. Because if whats being said by MTLS and all the other Firstgroup bashers is as true as it's set in stone, after six months First Great Western will be no-more and everything will be hunky dorey. Trains will run and they will run to time, and anyone and his brother will be able to walk right up at whatever station they care to board a train without buying a ticket and be allowed to buy the cheapest available from the guard.

So, why don't they outsource ticket inspection to another company that is paid on the basis of commission gained from penalty tickets ?  There's probably a few wheel clamping firms or traffic wardens who would do it!   It's a win-win....FGW doesn't lose money from collecting additional fares (and indeed publciitly ensures that more people actually buy a ticket), fare paying passengers get to watch fare dodgers being clamped :-)

So because you were late (OK through no fault of your own) you went through 3 red lights, people die because car drivers run red lights.
Was it so important that you were prepared to kill to make a train, you need to leave earlier of learn to chill out more.

Firstly - worcester town centre at 615am is dead - whilst I dont condone running red lights - the three I ran you could see if anything was coming first.

i.e. I pulled up - noting coming - went through - I did not blindly go through them.

What was so important?  Rather important meeting in only my first full week at a new client which if I pull it off will open doors.  I left in plenty of time - maybe if the next train was not over an hour later I wouldnt have felt so inclined

"That's alright officer, I know you've just caught me doing 140mph in my new Porsche but it's four in the morning and I thought as no-one was on the roads, it would be okay to see how fast it would go."

Sorry, your argument does not stand up in any shape or form.

Unless you happen to be a member of the emergency services, on an emergency call, you have broken the law and the police won't give a damn about what meeting you had to attend.  You might have deemed it safe, but your not the one making the laws in this country are you?

Train companies have involved private security or similar with ticket inspections. It doesn't work. These firms generally employ largely unskilled people on low wages, who have less reason to use discretion or customer service. They also have little or no railway knowledge, and generally end up antagonising railway staff. Plenty of occasions involving them where staff themselves, let alone passengers have ended up being done, as they don't recognise the diagrams / passes. Plus it's a pain for the passenger to report issues with them, should they not follow correct procedure, as the train company would merely say, not our employees and pass you on.

A classic example of this was the use of Securicor employees on Manchester Piccadilly. Utter nightmare. I believe all ticketing is dealt with by employees of the train operating companies at this station now.

Plus like all contractors they are unlikely to have any real loyalty to the company or those who work in it, as they will receive no travel allowances or railway pensions. Cleaning standards improved greatly under SWT when all cleaning was taken in house.

Contracting out to the lowest bidder might improve company profits, but passengers won't see that in the form of ticket prices lowering, and certainly won't see any sort of improvement in customer service. Most of the trains have guards anyway, if you take the ticket aspect away from them, they will still be needed for the trains to run, and instead of having knowledgable railway people being visible, they'll just be in the brake van dossing, whilst the security staff roam the trains, penalty faring everyone.

True - but at the end of the day I didnt get caught, no one got hurt, I caught my train and its not something I do regularly (in fact I believe that was the first time!)

Mookiemoo...Triple SPAD Driver eh..... i reckon you would be looking for a new job if you were a Train Driver.

The rules are there whether or not you didn't hurt anybody!!

The admin of Penalty fares is dealt with by an outside company, a collections agency to be precise, it would be illiegal to apply any sort of "incentive" to issue penalty fares, as the issuer has to remain impartial at all times,  same applies to traffic wardens issuing parking tickets etc. Contractors are a pain in the backside for non customer service jobs such as fitting light bulbs etc, let alone front line jobs like issuing penalty fares!!

Vacman I 100% agree Contractors are a pain in the backside for Non-customer service jobs.

From what I've seen they (contractors), well at least some of them are more dishonest than Harmless fare dodgers!! ;D