10 ways to avoid penalty fares on trains - Evening Standard

Altarf

KeithP wrote: »

If there really was no guard on the train, your only option is to pay the fare before you travel.

I take it you are familiar with the penalty fares rules, and that passengers should not be expected to queue for an unreasonable length of time.

And also that "A passenger who has a ticket for the journey they are making, but who is using a route on which their ticket is not valid, may not be charged a penalty fare. The National Rail Conditions of Carriage allow the passenger to pay an excess fare to travel on a different route from that shown on their ticket." hence why I was asking about the routing of the train.

KeithP

Altarf wrote: »

I take it you are familiar with the penalty fares rules, and that passengers should not be expected to queue for an unreasonable length of time.

And also that "A passenger who has a ticket for the journey they are making, but who is using a route on which their ticket is not valid, may not be charged a penalty fare. The National Rail Conditions of Carriage allow the passenger to pay an excess fare to travel on a different route from that shown on their ticket." hence why I was asking about the routing of the train.

Thank you Altarf for your detailed explanation of those points.

I had indeed overlooked your first point.
All we need to do now is to find a definition for "an unreasonable length of time".

I interpreted the statement...
"I travel daily into London from a station that is further from my home address than my nearest but as it has free parking and the season ticket costs £500 less than from my station, it makes good MSE sense to travel that way. (yes you did read correctly, the station 3 miles down the road costs a full £500 a year less to travel from. )"
to mean that the two stations were on the same line but the season ticket was from a station which was nearer to London.
I can understand why you thought that maybe it meant something different though.

Altarf

The Department of Transport (who allow the Penalty Fare scheme) guidelines are five minutes at peak times to buy a ticket, or three minutes outside the peak.

As for the route, it was unclear whether the two stations were on the same line. I suspect that they are not, just one is geographically nearer than the other.

The only circumstance I can think if they are on the same line for the further being cheaper, is that the nearer station is served by a different TOC with faster trains that don't stop at the OPs station.

If they are different line and different TOC, then obviously the pricing can be completely different.

The answer obviously has an impact on the PF situation.

KeithP

I agree that there is ambiguity here.

"further being cheaper"
I think the statement was "further from home", not "further from London".
Thus by driving three miles towards London, £500 could be saved.

Anyhow, I'm sure Sportbeth can clarify this in due course.

:beer:

Altarf

Exactly some information, but not enough facts.

sportbeth

hello all

The station that I have a ticket from is on the same line, but closer to london than the station I travelled back to the other day.

The ticket machine at the station only allows me to input a destination, not select one station to start my journey from and another to end it, so that only presented me with options to buy a full ticket (my season ticket already covered most of the journey)

I guess therefore the question is that if I pass my ticketed destination and stop at the next one on the same line and on the same operator as my season ticket allows for, can they force me to pay a penalty?

Just for clarification, there is no guard on our train at all, never has been one. My only remaining option would be to hop off at the station that my ticket should take me to and buy an extended ticket, but the trains only run once every hour so that would be crazy.

sportbeth

KeithP wrote: »

I agree that there is ambiguity here.

"further being cheaper"
I think the statement was "further from home", not "further from London".
Thus by driving three miles towards London, £500 could be saved.

Anyhow, I'm sure Sportbeth can clarify this in due course.

:beer:

just to clarify in case I hadn't, the cheaper station is further from and of course closer to London. And yes, three miles drive does save £500. Oddly it would cost me far less to drive it or take a bus if there was one!

Altarf

Because you were travelling further than your ticket allowed, for that last leg you were travelling "ticketless", so yes strictly speaking they could penalty fare you.

However if you wanted to make a nuisance of yourself, you could write to the big cheese at the Train Operating Company that you use, and point out that they are issuing Penalty Fares in breach of the Department of Transport's guidelines, which include

One of the SRA's three basic conditions for approving a penalty fares scheme is that passengers must be given a sufficient opportunity to buy a ticket or permit to travel before they get on a penalty fares train or enter a compulsory ticket area. Every penalty fares station must have sufficient facilities for selling tickets.

Where penalty fares apply, passengers must allow enough time to buy a ticket, including time to queue, if necessary. Under normal circumstances, passengers may still be charged a penalty fare if they join a train without a ticket, even if there was a queue at the ticket office or ticket machine. However, we expect operators to provide enough ticket windows, ticket machines and staff at staffed stations to meet the queuing standards set out in the Ticketing and Settlement Agreement and their Passenger's Charter under normal circumstances. This standard is normally five minutes at peak times and three minutes at other times.

At staffed stations, operators must provide a second way of selling tickets in addition to the ticket office.

So I would point out that not only did the queue at London exceed 5 minutes, but the member of staff at your destination made no attempt to check whether this was true or not.

Secondly, after you had seen the ridiculous length of the queue you tried to buy a ticket from a machine, but the machines do not sell the appropriate excess ticket, which would have made your journey legal.

So as you had no alternative you boarded the train, attempted to find a member of staff on board, and when you discovered that there was no body on board you could buy a ticket from, that you were intending to pay at your destination.

You were prevented from doing so, and were charged a penalty fare incorrectly.

And if you don't get a satisfactory response you are going to write to the Department of Transport to request that due to a failure to keep to the conditions, they withdraw permission for their penalty fare scheme.

You may or may not get a result on the PF they issued to you, but you will at least you will tie them up in £20's worth of time answering you.

And before someone leaps in with "she should have bought a ticket", my answer (and the DoT's) is she wanted to, but they didn't provide her with facilities to do so.

tomstickland

I fail to see what is wrong with the article. It is there to help people who could fall for lies that the train companies use in trying to extract money from them.

asbokid

FARE-COP wrote: »

Boarding a train and intending to pay if someone asks is a very dangerous game to play as Mr Corbyn discovered following the Appeal Court judgement in 1978.

That's an awfully old case to cite...

What about citing a more recent case of fare-dodging?

That of Cherie Booth QC, perhaps?