Bußgelder und Verurteilungen für geringfügige Fehler – wie Bahntickets Fahrgäste verwirren

As with that article the other day, when it comes to the trains they always seem to pick on the meek quiet teenagers or middle class middle aged quietly spoken passengers that have made an honest mistake…

While those guys you see swaggering up and jumping the barriers? Its tumbleweeds and staff just seem to watch them do it with a shrug.

I’ve felt so confused at ticket machines that I use even daily, and often feel compelled to buy the more expensive peak ticket just in case, because it’s not at all clear at the machine or the train website what constitutes ‘off peak’. Naturally they’re closing any manned ticket booths too so you can’t actually ask a human being either.

There’s a conspiratorial part of my brain that thinks this is all intentionally vague right up until the moment you’re unwittingly ‘caught’, whereupon the legalese fine print suddenly comes out and you’re slapped with a huge fine.

And don’t get me started on the uphill ultra marathon that’s ‘Delay Repay’.

Rail companies have probably spent more money setting up these kinds of schemes to catch out and fine well-meaning passengers than they have on actually trying to improve their service or expand capacities.

How do they prove it is you who bought the ticket wrongly in question? Show the evidence. Writing to people saying we think and they might respond giving details of an admission that it were them. That’s you caught. These letters should go in the bin.

The article notes that a tap-in-tap-out payment system like the London Oyster card is being considered. I like the idea of this, except that when you don’t tap out your Oyster, it can assume that you have made the longest-possible journey in London. In peak times, this is around £15, with the absolute maximum possible of £29 to Reading.

Maximum train charges can be much, much higher, so you’d still have to have a system set up to avoid the situation where someone taking two stops on a local service isn’t being charged as much as the maximum cross-country one… while someone travelling a very long distance doesn’t bother to tap out, because they know that the penalty is less than the ticket.

I used to use a train which would have a 20 minute wait halfway through the journey. During the wait it would share a platform with another train which left at a similar time but went somewhere completely different. They were both on *the same platform*.

Every day you’d get someone getting on our train when they meant to get on the other. You could usually tell them as they’d have a suitcase so most of the time it fell to the passengers to let them know. But naturally people would slip through at the last minute or without anyone noticing.

I saw penalty fares handed out a few times to people who had mistakenly got on the wrong train. Often middle aged couples who’d just returned from a holiday. They literally had tickets for the other train, but absolutely no understanding was shown to them at all. It’s disgusting.

And their mistake was going to the correct platform but not realising that there were two trains waiting there.

Serious serious repercussions (significant fine/criminal record(!)) for something so innocuous. It’s unbelievably disproportionate.

And it’s completely fraudulent for a ticket branded as “Anytime” to not literally mean anytime. That’s fucking bollocks.

And they want people to be using public transport instead of driving to save the planet? When passengers get shafted in a million different ways? Fuck off.

From my experience train managers and guards are usually pretty understanding and lenient about honest mistakes, either charging an excess or at worst saying you’ll need to get off at the next station. The fines and penalties tend to be when it’s obvious to them the passengers did deliberately try to cheat and then plays ignorance to get away with being found out.

There’s good and bad people at every job, but most train managers have been doing the job a long time and know from experience various signs.

There is nothing remotely confusing about discount rail cards. Anytime ticket can be used anytime. Your discount card, that makes it very clear in the information you get when it can be used, can only be used at certain times as you are told.

When you have to travel through a station, it is always on the ticket.

And the amount of information that has been plastered in basically every station in the country for 15-20 years stating you need a ticket before boarding and other constant campaigns means I have no sympathy for someone jumping on hoping the person will let them pay then whining when it works sometimes and doesn’t others. You are allowed if there is no access to buy one at the station, or you get one. Otherwise expect a fine, and if you get away with it that’s a bonus.

The only issue mentioned here that should be looked at are routes that apparently don’t accept digital tickets that you can buy one for. Never seen one, but people would rightly be annoyed if that ended with any fine and it shouldn’t be allowed.

Once it became possible to ‘auto-punish’ the public it was inevitable that such as this would appear.

It’s only going to get even worse since government don’t seem to care and are even in on it themselves. Witness what is soon going to happen with government access to bank accounts, initially for those receiving benefits but we know how these things go.

Welcome on board, this is your train manager speaking. Please listen carefully to this five minute pre-emptive explanation of the many possible ways you will be to blame if you’ve fallen afoul of our staggeringly intricate ticketing universe. I will shortly be making my way through the carriages to distribute notices of criminal proceedings.

Clear and transparent rules would help, but also eliminate private prosecutions by companies. Breaking a corporations terms should never result in a criminal record.

The one silver lining about all this is that Northern have gotten too greedy and now have the DfT breathing down their neck