We asked the guy on the gate to let us through saying that we would buy tickets on the train or when we got to Waterloo. He was a total jobsworth and absolutely flatly refused to let us pass and said that if we went through the barrier we would be subject to a penalty fare. I can't imagine what penalty could be worse than having to travel on SWT but there you go. Anyway, we were forced to go back into the ticket hall. I don't understand why we can't just wave our mobile phones and get on the train like they do in Japan. All of this Victorian messing around with bits of cardboard is a joke. By the way, when I told the guy on the gate that I thought it was absurd having a ticket line stretching all the way to the door forcing people to miss trains., he said, essentially, 'tough'.
In order to try an avoid the still enormous lines, I went to investigate the ticket machines. Both of the ticket machines weren't working. Here's an SWT person trying to fix them while we were standing in line like lemons.
Actually the machines aren't terribly useful even when the are working. They appear essentially unchanged since the first world war. You have to feed notes and coins in to get a ticket out. Since I never have enough cash on me, and even if I do the machines will only take exact change or won't take my notes at all, they are essentially useless. However, a little while back someone had mentioned to SWT that credit cards had been invented half a century ago. On the entire station they have one machine capable of taking credit cards, but it's never working. Today, as usual, it was broken again. I'm starting to wonder if even SWT are sufficiently incompetent to have this machine broken all the time and I'm beginning to suspect that they've actually switched it off. It doesn't take chip-n-pin cards you see (the chip-n-pin switchover had only been known about for five or six years which clearly isn't long enough for SWT to plan for it) so I expect people use fraudulent cards in it all the time.
Meanwhile, the line was still huge. I went to try and find out the problem. I think I discovered it right away. The "help" desk was closed and there was no one there. This meant that the ticket line was clogged up with people who wanted to find out information rather than buy a ticket. Now we recently tried to find out the price of a train ticket from Woking to Newcastle. Despite being intelligent people with considerable experience of electronic commerce and online travel purchasing, we found the railway websites utterly incomprehensible. It's no wonder people find it easier to actually go to the station.
Here are the people trying to find out if you can take live toads to Inverness, and if so what might be the best route. These queries take about a hundred times as long as buying a ticket. Even the most rudimentary queueing theory simulation would reveal the disastrous consequences of allowing them in the ticket office. As only two of the three ticket windows were open anyway, an intelligent solution might've been (apart from installing modern ticket machines that accept cards) to have one window for information and one for tickets. But no.
They're still there while I missed yet another train.
I finally got on a train at 11.17 and even then I had to stand up all the way to Waterloo in boiling heat surrounded by unwashed young persons coming back from the Isle of Wight pop festival (festival, pah!, listening to Coldplay whining isn't a festival, I remember Glastonbury back when it was worth going to and I saw Led Zeppelin at Knebworth etc etc).
Does anyone know how you vote against a train company retaining a franchise?
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1 comment:
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