Great Western Coffee Shop

Travelled today from St Erth to Exeter with XC on their ex PNZ 8:25.
What a lesson in how to manage a train !
All the stuff you'd expect from a good TM plus repeated warnings of luggage loading to allow the trolley to move through, repeated requests to move large stuff to the big store in 'D', repeated warnings of high passenger flow...all while checking tickets between EVERY stop and announcing every stop and branch connection and helping folk with various problems.
The chap never stopped for a minute - this is what I usually see on XC services - even if the TM isn't very chatty he/she will have checked my ticket by Hayle or on the way to Camborne.
FGW DMUs are fairly good unless rammed...HSTs are mostly a free ride to Plymouth where ticket checking happens at St Budeaux ferry road just before the barriers at Plymouth  ???...returning from anywhere in Devon via HST is usually free.
I always have a ticket as the conductors on the St Ives branch (now two) are top notch.

 

Nice to havea post about XC and Voyagers that aren't along the usual spawn of the devil lines.
To be honest a Voyager is a lot easier to work than an HST, no need for SDO and the availability of public address handsets throughout the train makes it  lot easier to get through and actually interact with the passengers.

A gentle reminder to readers of this topic - there is a fare to be payed for your journey on FGW in Cornwall, whatever type of train is running it, and it's incumbent on the passenger to pay that fare at the earliest reasonable opportunity.  To attempt to travel without having a valid ticket covering the train journey that you're on, and with the intention of being able to sidestep any mechanisms that will get you to pay is illegal ... to suggest to people (which our original poster is NOT doing - quite) that they should attempt to get an illegally free journey is incitement, and would cause somewhat more that a gentle moderator's warning.

With penalty fares coming into active play very soon, there should be very much more encouragement on people who knowingly break the law and attempt to steal rail travel off the train operating companies to pay up - and that is welcome.  But the fare system is very complex and, as we have seen here, very hard to interpret at times - I do hope that we don't see a rash of penalty fare notices issued in situations where there's no way it would have been reasonable to expect the traveller to be aware of the detail of the rules and how to apply them.

Asking to move your luggage to the large stowage area in 'D' is all well and good, but how does this tally with requests "to keep your luggage with you at all times"?

They dont used that wording on XC.  Only FGW use that wording.  Each company has a slightly diffeent interpretation of the security message required by the Department of Transport.  IIRC on XC they simply ask you to make sure that the luggage is safely stowed and that you should know where it is.  I think the FGW way is wrong because if you follow it to the letter you would never be able to go to the toilet or buffet.

It is a lot easier to do tickets on a 4 car voyager than on an 8 car HST, with the exception of Truro and Penzance EVERY station on the up through Cornwall is a "short" platform requiring the TM to be in a certain part of the train to release the doors, making ticket checking extremely difficult.

I agree, but the solution to my mind would be to have twice as many staff on an HSt than a voyager.  Surely they would pay for themselves?

The best solution is to have barriers at all main stations

Sorry to disagree, but to my mind the BEST solution is to have staff at ALL stations (with the obvious exception of wayside halts)

The second best option to to have barriers at all stations.

The third best option would be, as you say, to have barriers at all main stations.

I didn't say more staff on trains is the only or the best solution, but I am surprised to hear on the one hand statistics like 5% of fares are uncollected and then see TOCs failing to take simple steps to collect those fares.  How much money does a good revenue protection person take per day?  more than his/her salary, I would have thought.  Hiring more of them just makes economic sense I would have thought.

I am not a huge fan of barriered stations but I am perpared to conceed that at many stations they are an important part of the solution.  What really annoys me though is that they are not implemented well and used consistantly.  FGW and other TOCs seem to think that it is enough to merely send out a message that ticketless travel is bad, and they think that barriers convey that message.  Well if you don't bother to man them every day including in the evenings, you end up sending out the opposite message.

I know that you will not like this Vacman (sorry) but since barriers were installed at Bath and Paddington, the quality of on-board checking between those stations has declined sharply especially on HSTs. I know that the crews have a lot of work to do, but 8 years ago the Guard on the am Bristolian almost always managed to check the whole train despite selling 3 or 4 tickets in each coach.  Nowadays I get checked maybe 60% of the time. 

Although barriers ensure that someone has a ticket, it doesn't make sure they have the correct ticket.  For example, someone could buy a ticket to the next station to get through the barrier, then continue their journey without a ticket.  Even if their destination had barriers, they could do something similar there, having bought the ticket in advance.

Also with advance tickets now in popular use, you need on-board checks to ensure people are on the correct train.  Otherwise people could buy a ^5 ticket to travel at silly-o'clock in the morning when they actually travel on a packed train during rush hour where advance tickets are considerably more expensive.

Yes there should be more on train checks, but they should be CHECKS, not spending forever selling tickets to people that should have purchased them at station! Barriers are an effective means of revenue protection as it is the stations in the surrounding area that start to take more money when barriers are installed at main stations. But I accept and agree that FGW don't use their barriers as they should as most of the time they are open due to staff shortages and a reluctance to fill vacancies, but now we're in a new financial year lets hope they start to recruit!

I know of 2 more stations that are to be barriered in the next 9 months (must be operational by 01/01/2011) that is Truro and Exeter Central.

As for "how much does a revenue protection person take", well an RPI who is able to carry out their duties properly should not sell any tickets but be issuing PF's and interviewing and reporting fare evasion!

Worth noting it looks like some gaps are being filled (currently advertised vacancies):

Gateline Assistant (Swindon)
Gateline Operative (Maidenhead)

and I know they did a recruit a month or so ago for Gateline at Reading and Paddington too.

How are they barriering Exeter :s They closing the footbridge at the Waterloo end or something?

Not sure of the exact plans old pal, but will be released shortly.

apparently not closing New North road end as we originally thought but having manned barriers both there and at the Queen Street end. Now, how often these will be manned (and they have to be manned to be operational) is another question. I would suggest that there's a very good chance they'll be known as the Queen St folly before too long!

Separate barrier lines are allowed to be CCTV monitored - SWT have a couple of such installations, eg at Havant. In the evenings the up side barrier line is controlled by the guy at the main (downside) barrier line, there is a help point with a camera to allow tickets to be checked remotely.

Paul

Automatic gates going in at the queen street end

As has been mentioned, there seems to be a sudden increase of movement on the vacancy list now the new financial year is approaching.

Travelled last night as far as EXD on the 2006 PAD-PLY and no attempt was made to check tickets by the TM (who also managed to announce arrival at Westbury 5 seconds before the train came to a halt at the station!). Given the number of calls at unstaffed/ungated stations after Reading I thought this was a tad slack.