Great Western Coffee Shop

Strange question.... Are ticket gates capable of "wiping" a ticket's magstripe?

The full story: I'm a dinosaur so I still use a paper season ticket. Earlier this year I had a spate of tickets failing to operate the gates; at one point I'd managed to go through two replacement tickets in a month. I thought it might be something in my pocket doing it, so I've become fairly diligent about keeping it in a separate pocket from any obvious sources of magnetism. But I noticed a pattern:

• The first time a ticket stops working, the gate seems to behave differently. The ticket stays in there for a while before the gate spits it out. This only happens the first time it fails to go through, suggesting that something is different about the ticket the next time it enters a gate.
• That first gate fail often happened at a particular gate (I think - or at least a particular part of the gateline). It's one that is usually used for the 'exit' flow so I don't often use it on entering the station, but on some occasions it was being used for the 'entry' flow, and it was on those occasions that the issue happened.
• When I realised the above, I made a point of not using the suspect part of the gateline... and after that my tickets started lasting the whole month!

...Until yesterday. I used a gateline I don't often use; the slow processing issue occurred, and since then my ticket hasn't been 'working'.

So are the gates somehow 'wiping' or 'marking' my ticket? Speculating, perhaps they notice a possible error, try to re-read once or twice, then decide to mark it fully unreadable for next time?

As it was often the same gate, could there be something wrong with that gate? (But surely someone would have noticed the pattern if so...)

Intriguingly, one of the times it happened the person who let me though said something like "it's wiped it", but early in the morning I can't guarantee I heard him correctly!



 

Yes is the short answer!

The gates at Marylebone wiped the mag strips in card tickets & season tickets often, and probably still do. It’s a known problem.

It was a pain in the arse to keep having to replace the season regularly, where the ticket office staff were kept very busy. Thankfully working from home now!

Will be even more of a problem when there are no ticket office staff!

In answer to the original question, yes they sometimes do.  The belts pulling the ticket though can slip, the heads get dirty or there is a momentary power glitch. 

Picking up on ChrisB's point though, the gate does a final check that it can read back the updated details (time, location etc) it thinks it sent to the ticket. If it can't, it's too late for that ticket but if it happens more than a few times the gate will report itself as faulty and shut down requesting a service.  If it's appearing to happen over a long period of time then the chances are it's not the gate at fault even if that seems to be the common factor; more likely it's poor quality tickets that can't hold up to repeated use, or the user is bringing a ticket close to an unnoticed magnet.  Having said that, Marylebone's LU gates are right by the top of the escalators so particularly likely to get dust in the workings.

Automated fault reporting has improved hugely. Back in the early days of ticket gates I eventually tracked down a rogue gate that for several weeks had been not wiping tickets but changing them into a different type. It was a little-used gate at a busy station and the problem only showed up at the next place the ticket was used, so it took a while to spot a pattern in a trickle of what seemed to be random complaints about problems with gates at various stations. Quite satisfying eventually to spot various incidental mentions of the same station with clues about which gate might have been used, then head down and replicate it before getting the offending gate seen to.

Yes, it's happened to me too at Paddington. Would have been at least 10 years ago. Put ticket in, ticket comes out other end but straight away the ticket was pulled back in before I had a chance to grab it. A crunching sort of sound followed then the ticket came back out. The gate did not open and the ticket did not work again. Had to get a replacement from the ticket office.

I went towards the end of December 2020 to renew my Annual Travelcard on an Oyster at a London Victoria. They said they couldn’t do it anymore and to try somewhere else. I tried various mainline stations who all said they couldn’t do it. Then Thameslink at Kings Cross were able to do it, problem solved.

Fast forward to 2021 and it turns out Thameslink can’t do it now either. I spoke to the bloke at the ticket office who said it had been removed during the year. He said he thought the only way to do it now was online. I spoke to TFL staff at a station who confirmed this was the case. I asked about doing it online and the Gold record card. They said it would probably be posted to me and take a while. That didn’t help with my rail journey the next day. So I went back to the Thameslink ticket office and bought a paper one there. The machine printing it mangled the first paper ticket and then the second as well.

Third time lucky, but something still wasn’t right and it had issues after the first day of use. Second day of use it stopped working altogether. As a result I am no longer bothering with using it in the barriers. I just ask a member of staff at the gateline to let me through. I’ve now heard various opinions about the person who closed the Underground ticket offices from lots of TFL and national rail staff.

When my annual paper ticket expired 3 years ago, I upgraded to an annual ticket on a smartcard. The gold record card arrives in the post from SWR about a week later. However the smartcard became faulty a few months ago and needed to be replaced. That's my fault though because I like to keep it in my back pocket. It's more rigid than a paper ticket and the contactless loop must have got damaged.
Still, it lasted longer than the paper ones which needed replacing due to faults every few months.

I'm pretty sure the gates Deutsche Bahn Arriva installed at Cardiff Queen Street are particularly susceptible to wiping tickets. I've often wondered what outfit they got to manufacture those ones, as they seem peculiarly unreliable, and significantly worse than the barriers they replaced.