Ticket checks

Sat 2 Jun 2012, 01:08 (last edited on Sat 2 Jun 2012, 09:22)

Emily, I'm afraid I'm struggling to see what the problem is. You had a ticket, you were asked to show it by railway staff. So what? What is ridiculous about that? Or is just that they were 'rude'? And if so, how? By asking to see your ticket? It's their job as revenue protection inspectors to check that people have tickets, whether they are entering a station, on a train, or leaving a station. And in law, your ticket is actually the property of the railway company.

As for anyone travelling from Charlbury (and other places besides) to Paddington 'would have to have a ticket'. I'm sure that will give FGW's staff a good laugh. Me too, after some of the encounters between ticketless passengers and conductors I have witnessed over the years. My favourite of recent times was a man who boarded one morning last year at Kingham without a ticket, money, a bank card or any form of ID and insisted he was going to Paddington no matter what. He was led off the train at Oxford and told he was going no further until he found a way to pay for a ticket.

It's not just about people who have got on a train at Charlbury and are returning home. People do make the journey in the other direction (or from all manner of other stations that lack ticket barriers, as Richard points out - and what he meant was that someone could get on at barrier-less Banbury, cross the bridge at Oxford and board a train to Charlbury without needing to go anywhere near the barriers at Oxford. Oh, and there is a way on to the platforms at Oxford that avoids the barriers at certain times of the day). Before barriers started to go in at Paddington, the 17.22 and 18.22 from London (and their predecessors) were notorious for the number of people on Friday evenings heading for the weekend to Charlbury and Kingham in particular without tickets, clearly hoping that they would get off before the conductor reached them on such busy trains - and if they managed that, hoping to make the return trip on Sunday without having to pay then either.

The Adelantes are leased but under their franchise, FGW can't just go out and lease extra rolling stock, they have to ask the DfT's permission, as it doesn't want its revenue stream from FGW to go down.

Fares keep going up... I don't think so. The Cotswold Line's fares were frozen from 2009 until the start of this year while the track redoubling work was taking place - and many local off-peak fares were actually reduced at the start of 2009. Places that are a comparable distance/journey time from London, such as Swindon, pay an awful lot more for tickets, and are outside the Network Card zone, so can't get the discounts that it offers on off-peak fares, nor do they have a local railcard as well.

There is a problem with fare evasion and FGW - prodded by the DfT - is doing something about it, so that, as Brian says, the rest of us don't have to pay even more. The Cotswold Line Promotion Group agm last month was told that in the weeks since the revenue protection teams started to appear, footfall at the ticket offices on the line has risen noticeably, along with revenue. It should also have the spin-off of giving a much more accurate picture of how many people are actually travelling and helping to make the case for further improvements to the line and extra trains in the future.