‘Innocent ticket error cost my police career’: The passengers suing rail firms

4 comments

1. Looks like we have the next scandal brewing and again private prosecution are involved.

2. They are absolute fucking chancers. My dad last month got ticketed because his veterans rail pass card was out of date… *he showed her it had been renewed on the app* and she STILL ticketed him.

   OK, just contact customer service to resolve, right? Wrong. First, the number he was given to dispute it had been disconnected. Then the ticket office he was directed to turned him away because it was an office for a different rail company (despite being the only ticket office in a large city’s train station). He got back to customer service who gave him an email. THE EMAIL BOUNCED BACK AS NOT IN USE.

   So where do you go from here? He won’t pay the fine (as he fucking shouldn’t). All the avenues to contest the fine don’t exist. How is this legal?

3. My partner hit the triple combo yesterday-

   Ticket office closed

   Ticket machine broken

   Notices all over the place saying ‘DO NOT BOARD TRAIN WITHOUT TICKET’

4. From the article – “One of the people being represented by Higgs claims he was wrongly prosecuted by a rail company when he was unable to buy a ticket because the machine at his station was broken and there were no staff available in the ticket office.”

   This was a near daily occurrence when I was catching trains regularly in the mid-late 2000s. Why am I unsurprised to read this can still be an issue? I used to catch a train from the 1 station nearby that had a ticket office but it may as well have not had one; 8 times out of 10 the shutter would be down/it would be closed. As for the ticket machines, they were magnets for vandalism.

   It’s about bloody time someone challenged the rail companies. I had to come to the aid of a poor lady once, who was having grief from a conductor after asking to buy a ticket on the train. She’d asked as soon as she was getting on the train and I’d seen her trying to get the attention of the member of staff in the ticket office before the train arrived. There was no way that shutter was being pulled up that day!
   This conductor wasn’t having any of it though. “Your responsibility is to have purchased a ticket before boarding.” He wouldn’t believe her that the machine was out of order and the ticket office had been to all intents and purposes closed. I piped up and said it was the same for me and I’ll need to buy a ticket too. He tried arguing the toss with me but soon changed his tune when I said ok, let’s have details for how to make complaints please and told him what I thought of his stinking attitude.

   I was glad when I no longer had a need to catch trains regularly.

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