Dual availability season ticket - doesn't open barriers at alternative station

[87 027]

I renewed my Annual Gold Card season ticket into London Terminals with SouthEastern earlier this month, taking up the option of adding an alternative station which is printed on the face of the ticket as "AAA" followed by the station name. The main station is on the Sidcup line and the alternative station is on the Bexleyheath line.

However my ticket consistently fails to open the barriers at the alternative station - it gets rejected every time with code 116 which I believe means station not allowed for entry or exit. SouthEastern staff have been absolutely fine about allowing me through, but I wondered whether this is a ticket coding or a gateline programming issue, and if it regularly happens elsewhere?

 

[barrykas]

However my ticket consistently fails to open the barriers at the alternative station - it gets rejected every time with code 116 which I believe means station not allowed for entry or exit. SouthEastern staff have been absolutely fine about allowing me through, but I wondered whether this is a ticket coding or a gateline programming issue, and if it regularly happens elsewhere?

It's technically a programming issue as the gates can't be programmed to check for a valid route, just origin, destination, ticket type and any discounts.

Hence, a ticket from London - Birmingham route London Midland only will quite happily open the gates at Marylebone and Birmingham Moor Street...

 

[trc666]

They can be programmed to check for routes - for example our barriers at Waterloo reject anything routed VIA UNDERGROUND/DLR, FCC ONLY, SOUTHERN ONLY or NOT VIA LONDON.

 

[island]

They can be programmed to check for routes - for example our barriers at Waterloo reject anything routed VIA UNDERGROUND/DLR, FCC ONLY, SOUTHERN ONLY or NOT VIA LONDON.

Which is a pain when the ticket held is an outboundary Travelcard with one of the middle two routes, and therefore perfectly valid on SWT!

 

[Urban Gateline]

Which is a pain when the ticket held is an outboundary Travelcard with one of the middle two routes, and therefore perfectly valid on SWT!

Depending where the passenger came from, if they came from Portsmouth or Southampton with a "Southern Only" outboundary Travelcard on the direct South West Trains service then they may find themselves in trouble!

 

[LexyBoy]

Which is a pain when the ticket held is an outboundary Travelcard with one of the middle two routes, and therefore perfectly valid on SWT!

Better than people being fined for mistakenly using it to travel back to whichever outboundary station they came from.

 

[barrykas]

They can be programmed to check for routes - for example our barriers at Waterloo reject anything routed VIA UNDERGROUND/DLR, FCC ONLY, SOUTHERN ONLY or NOT VIA LONDON.

Hrm...Must depend on the software version, or possibly a setting that only the gate manufacturer can change. Certainly couldn't find it on our SCU when we were trying to set it to reject by route.

 

[trc666]

Which is a pain when the ticket held is an outboundary Travelcard with one of the middle two routes, and therefore perfectly valid on SWT!

This is done intentionally at Waterloo to stop people travelling all the way from Dorking, Leatherhead, Ashtead and Epsom with Southern Only tickets as we have direct services to and from those stations. The Travelcard is perfectly valid on our services up to zone 6 but after that it isn't.

Hrm...Must depend on the software version, or possibly a setting that only the gate manufacturer can change. Certainly couldn't find it on our SCU when we were trying to set it to reject by route.

The SCU has settings to monitor, alarm or reject certain tickets such as child tickets, Railcard discounted tickets etc, but as for routes not sure if they are set by tables being downloaded to the gates by the engineer. Are the gates at your station installed by Cubic?

 

[barrykas]

The SCU has settings to monitor, alarm or reject certain tickets such as child tickets, Railcard discounted tickets etc, but as for routes not sure if they are set by tables being downloaded to the gates by the engineer. Are the gates at your station installed by Cubic?

That'll be it then...Will have to give the relevant person a prod when I'm back at work next week, and yup it's a Cubic installation.

 

[cjohnson]

This is done intentionally at Waterloo to stop people travelling all the way from Dorking, Leatherhead, Ashtead and Epsom with Southern Only tickets as we have direct services to and from those stations. The Travelcard is perfectly valid on our services up to zone 6 but after that it isn't.

If a passenger held an Epsom-London Zones 1-6 Travelcard route: SOUTHERN ONLY, could they not have travelled via Southern from Epsom to Sutton, and thence to Waterloo (via, say, FCC to Wimbledon and then SWT to Waterloo) and still travelled in accordance with their ticket? How do the Waterloo gateline staff deal with this kind of situation?

 

[Mushtimushta]

@Island
The gates at Waterloo do accept out-boundary Travelcards routed "Southern Only", but reject rail only tickets carrying this route.
One could argue that it is inappropriate for Southern to use a "Southern Only" routeing on tickets that are valid on other operators services, however.
Back to the question asked in the original post - whilst it is possible to programme gates to accept or reject tickets on the basis of route, the "Also Available At" routes fall outside this, because the route codes for these tickets are outside the route code range 000 - 999 and gates can only recognise route codes within this range.

 

[Paul Kelly]

the "Also Available At" routes fall outside this, because the route codes for these tickets are outside the route code range 000 - 999 and gates can only recognise route codes within this range.

What is actually encoded on the ticket will be the last 3 digits of the route code, (encoded in 10 bits) and then a single-bit flag to indicate that the route code is greater than 1000. This should be enough to catch these tickets on the balance of probabilities, although I accept it is possible that limitations in various barrier software might prevent this.

 

[Mushtimushta]

@Indigo2
Your point being? I was trying to use (as near to) lay terms (as possible) in my earlier comment.

 

[Paul Kelly]

Point being that there's no real technical limitation as to why the gates can't recognise route codes outside the 000-999 range with a good chance of being correct. If the gate manufacturers say they can't then they are fobbing TOCs off.

 

[87 027]

The AAA option is relatively recent - certainly it wasn't available when I bought last year's ticket. I wonder if this explains the gates not being updated yet.