Recent content by Bletchleyite

Last time I looked for this it was broken, which was disgraceful as it is a massive fire hazard. That gateline should have been left open. 1751315800 Frequently. Rarely with e-tickets to be fair, but the TVMs at Bletchley are not very good at encoding paper tickets correctly, I find they...

To be fair just dropping the admin fee would be a start. There is no reason why an admin fee should be payable for an online change of an e-ticketed Advance fare; nobody does any actual administration. There are sales sites that don't, but it should be standard not to do so. Premier Inn does...

I think Scottish operator Ember will be inclined to disagree. And one thing about coaches (as distinct from low floor buses) is that there's loads of space for batteries under the floor.

It's been sort of alluded to. The reason LNER want to remove them has little to do with complexity and everything to do with wanting to put up fares at busy but traditionally off peak times.

That's just a counted place. Some TOCs do allow these to be sold over and above the number of actual reservable seats.

Not all services are 11 car to be fair. If it was a 9 swapping that for a 7 isn't a great issue as the number of Standard seats is about the same. If they're swapping what were 11 car diagrams for 7s, though, then they need a rethink at least until the second TPH starts in that hour.

If your phone doesn't have any kind of active security when using contactless for general payments, then TBH I wouldn't want that. I like the way Apple Pay is much more secure than even a physical card. I've knocked the contactless limit on my physical card right down (I think it was a tenner...

I can't see people being willing to do that when they also wish to use their phone to make contactless payments. That sounds like classic SNCF "we are the only ones who matter" arrogance to me.

Only if they don't set up a default "transit mode" card or whatever it's called; once you've done that you simply tap the phone with no need to interact with it in any way, unlike an NFC pass. In my observation most users in London now do have this set up, which means they simply tap their...

To be fair while the response time would be the same the fiddling with the phone to pull up the correct Wallet pass would cause at least some gateline obstruction, though possibly less than scanning barcodes so it would make sense to encourage this form of fulfilment. It's fairly common to have...

The seating areas are VERY high density. The problem is that only about 2/3 of the length of each vehicle is passenger accommodation.

It's clear XC does just need longer trains. TPE did for years, and now it has them there is largely no longer a problem.

It does slightly surprise me that we've not seen a solution along the lines of "scan your e-ticket with cross London validity at this machine and it'll spit out a gate pass", but I guess this plan renders that unnecessary.

I'd probably agree that the CAFs and 231s* are likely to be the only pure diesels left in say 25 years, yes, but we could really do without those too, if nothing else they will further the idea that branch lines should be replaced by electric buses. * If not fitted with a pantograph, which I...

Unfortunately the short-sighted construction of three large fleets of CAF Civity DMUs (which should really have been bi-modes) has put its spanner in that particular works. No way will those only get 20 years' use.