Alexia wrote:It seemed that the easiest thing was to redesign the tickets rather horribly than try and educate the travelling public what the markings on their ticket meant.
National Rail Enquiries has a section on their website about this (still in the old design at present). The kind of travelling public who seriously struggle with rail tickets though I doubt will find these any easier to deal with - they are the sort of people who will look at the departure boards, see 'Plymouth - Platform 2', go to platform 2, read the next train indicator on platform 2 saying 'Plymouth', listen to the automated announcement saying that the train on platform 2 goes to Plymouth, and read 'Plymouth' on the front of the train yet still feel the need to ask the dispatcher 'Is that the train to Plymouth?' before feeling comfortable boarding it.
WillPS wrote:It's funny how little the tickets which some of these machines are printing represent the official 'standard' now. One of the points of this exercise was to standardise the presentation of tickets to make frauds harder to spot. It seems as of the present moment none of the ticket machines have managed to print a circle or diamond in the top row, and I'm told if you collect tickets from a machine manufactured by Parkeon no railcard information is printed at all!
How will redesigning the formatting of the ticket help prevent fraud? They're still being printed on the same stock using the same equipment. There are many different printing mechanisms in use which all vary in quality and have detail differences so tickets do look different as you say. Redesigning the ticket does nothing to change that.
If you have access to legitimate stock (or a decent copy of it) and a thermal printer you can just as easily knock up a passable ticket using the new design. Paper rail tickets essentially have no workable security - no one is seriously going to check the number to see if the ticket is valid unless they have some other reason to believe it might be fake (and do staff on the ground have a way of verifying the numbers anyway?), and whilst fakes would get caught out at ticket barriers, all that ever happens when a barrier bleeps is the gateline staff examine it and then open the gate. Even the few overzealous types who check the fault code on the barrier are only really looking for the code that indicates the ticket has been through before, I can't see serious challenge on an unprogrammed ticket, especially when that seems to be a problem anyway - I usually end up with a few tickets per month which set the barrier off for no reason, I've never had any challenge on it.
All of that said, are fake tickets really a big problem on the railway? I know there is talk of eventually moving away from paper tickets to smartcards to combat fraud, but will the investment really save more revenue than it costs?