The LNER Encyclopedia

Evening
Train Manager being officious or just doing his job????????????
Keith
http://www.chroniclelive.co.uk/north-ea ... -28860977/

The train manager was being a total pillock!!!!

PP, I congratulate you on your restraint.

However, my cousin in Mississippi has a very good word for people like this "Train Manager" - remember when we had Guards and TTCs? - that he uses when profanity doesn't adequately express his feelings.

Man's a wretch.

Sums it up.

BTW, my cousin taught ME some swear words - then I returned the compliment...

Pretty disgusting.

1. The ticket inspector, clearly not smarter than a fifth grader, could (a) have turned a blind eye in the first place - the tickets were valid, and (b) given that the ladies' tickets had been bought as a gift online from a distant location, it should have been obvious that the relevant credit card could not have been produced on demand. Seems like basic intelligence is not a requirement for a ticket inspector's job.

2. Cross Country, but for its shameless grab at some extra revenue, could have allowed the ladies to produce the credit card in question as they had offered to do so upon arrival in Devon.

3. The website "thetrainline.com" weasles out it nicely by saying the fine process is none of their doing.

This is what goes for customer service these days? Bunch of jerks all around.

Typical of the low lifes running the railways today!

I suspect that the requirement to produce the credit card is a means of preventing more than one copy of the ticket being printed and used.
Photocopying (or its more modern alternatives) of tickets has been going on since the late 1960s when photocopies of Hugin tickets were spotted by alert staff. This led to a change to red pre-printing of Hugin stock and all subsequent ticket types eg.NCR51 had coloured pre-printing and/or security backgrounds. Even then a colour photocopied Aptis annual season was discovered.

The same rules apply to on-line train tickets in Germany. I often see people being asked for their credit card, which is the swiped through the machine the ticket inspector carries. I'm not sure what happens if the credit card cannot be produced.

I travel with a "50% DB travel card" - its number is also on both paper and on-line tickets. When I reached 60 I was issued with a new card with a new number. I failed to inform the company travel agent about the change and the next time I travelled a ticket inspector spotted that the numbers on the paper ticket and new card did not tally. I was told that the ticket was invalid - she then disappeared with ticket and card and came back half an hour later to tell me that she had been in touch with DB central (wherever that might be), and I would be allowed to travel further on the ticket.

You would have thought that the the ticket inspector/train manager could also have checked back with headquarters, especially considering the passengers involved.

Peter