Money Moral Dilemma: Someone forgot to take their train ticket - should I use it?

its fair game, if its imminent as someone said then i would use it, if it was booked in advance id consider handing it in, this kind of thing will happen all the time - its like finding a tenner in the street - keep it!

frankmadforit wrote: »

If the ticket has paid by credit/debit card then that can be asked to be seen when showing the train ticket

You're just making that up. There is nothing in law or the National Rail Conditions of Travel requiring the credit/debit card to be shown when presenting a physical ticket (some e-tickets may have this requirement).

Additionally, tickets don't show the card number so it could never be validated without checking the back office systems.

And what about people whose employers buy tickets with corporate cards?

AndyFras wrote: »

Last year, my husband and I arrived at Manchester Piccadilly station to collect our tickets from the machine. We were in a rush so grabbed the tickets and fled for our train. As we boarded the train for Edinburgh, I noticed that the return tickets were missing. Obviously, there must have been a pause between the outward bound and inward ones being printed. If the next person to use the machine had handed the tickets in to the office, we wouldn’t have had to pay again to come home. Sadly, nobody did.

You have too much faith in ticket offices.

There's no way of getting a ticket reprinted elsewhere (there is a procedure, but it is only supposed to be used in exceptional cases where a passenger is stranded without money, e.g. after being robbed, and someone buys a ticket for them elsewhere). You would've had to returned to Manchester to collect the ticket.

And you'd have no way of knowing the ticket had been handed in without returning in person. Most ticket offices don't hold phone numbers for other offices from their own company, let alone phone numbers for offices operated by other train companies.