Re: Virgin and revenue protection (or lack of)

On Aug 24, 8:49 pm, Charlie Hulme <i...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

Is Sheffield Supertram a modern city rail network?

Interesting question. It's operated more like a traditional tram than
other networks. I believe they had issues with vandalism of ticket
machines - but could that just be the design of machines they had at
the time? Other city networks still seem to use machines and penalty
fares rather than conductors.

Most tickets are bought in the morning, and Davenport has a
friendly and helpful station man in the mornings (this morning
struggling with the paperwork for refunding customers who had
bought PTE advance tickets for today!) - a ticket machine would
probably be a prelude to the station becoming fully unstaffed,
and I'm afraid I don't see that as a good thing.

Given limited funding, I'd rather see unstaffed stations (now
technology allows things like CCTV to provide at least some of the
security that it didn't do quite as effectively in the 1980s) than
service cuts or hefty fare rises. (In reality we'll get all three -
but the proportion could alter).

Rail ticket sales aren't what they used to be - witness closing of
Travel Centres. A massive chunk is now done online, a further big
chunk by telephone, and we now have ticket machines that can sell
almost every ticket (and they could be upgraded to be like the Swiss
ones that literally do sell everything). My view is heading very
strongly towards a need for a massive rethink on ticket offices - and
by that I mean that we could dispense with them almost completely.
What you'd then have is machines at local stations, and machines with
roving assistance staff at busier stations (the latter being former
ticket office staff). The queue at the ticket office at MKC is
normally full of people buying returns to London - that might perhaps
be better served by those people being shown a couple of times how to
use the machine then be able to do it themselves, no?

Neil
.

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