Northern Rail possible fare evasion prosecution

verybigchris

The following is taken from the National Rail Enquires site (full text here - I've edited it a bit due to shocking grammar and punctuation ):

Most major credit/debit cards are accepted.
Solo & Electron are not accepted by all TOC's, however they are accepted by :

• Gatwick Express - only available from Fast ticket machines at Gatwick Airport and London Victoria.
• Southern - only available from ticket office and Fast ticket machines.
• East Coast - however, if you are collecting your tickets from a self service machine at a station operated by National Express East Anglia, please note that Solo and Electron card payments are not accepted.

Customers will still be liable to a penalty fare if they and board a train within the Penalty Fares Area without a valid ticket.
Credit/debit cards accepted vary from TOC to TOC and the customer is advised to check in advance.

I think TOC = Train Operating Company

DaveMacD

Something that is maybe not made clear enough re. cards is that both Visa Electron and Switch Solo (that's the purple S logo) are cards that the banks do not guarantee. I.E. if I use my Visa to pay for something at £10, but my account only has £5 in it, the bank will promise to pay the people concerned the full amount (and then screw me over later). If you use your Electron card in the same circumstances, the bank will not pay out. While that isn't normally a problem in a shop (since their machine phones out to get confirmation of the transaction), most train companies don't have this tech. on their portable equipment (SPORTIS, AVANTIX etc.). That's why they don't accept Electron and Solo. Also, since you mention the CoOp, there can also be problems with some of their regular Visa bank cards, since they are using a new set of card numbers and they have been slow to give this info out to retailers. This returns an unknown card number error on the ticket machines, and won't allow the transaction to continue

Dr.Rock

powerhorse wrote: »

Oh - and one more thing - since I had my rights read to me and received an "official caution". Does this mean I now have a record of some kind. i.e. enough to show up on a CRB check, say?

Don't worry about that. Only the police can caution you. Unless it's to caution you not to use the train without paying in future. All that happened was some Police reject who's now an RPO got to act Billy Big-Balls for 5 minutes to brighten up his tedious day in a menial job.