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Fare evasion and not having a ticket in the 1970s

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CrilMitic

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I think that just like now you will be asked to either pay for your ticket or be dropped off at the first station.
 
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WesternLancer

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Scratching my head going back almost 50 years I sometimes covered a job which did nothing but deal with the aftermath of ticketless travel. It was a gloomy job in an even more gloomy office. I seem to recall you would get a raft of reports each day where Guards/Ticket Collectors had taken down particulars of persons travelling without a ticket. At that time there was no sure way of verifying Names and Addresses unless the Guard/Ticket Collector had managed to check some form of ID the person had with them. I think we had a pad of pre-printed letters with blanks in the wording to fill in with the places it had taken place, and amounts owing. I found one old blank example but unfortunately it only relates to Season tickets that had been 'left at home'. Anyway the letter was duly filled in and mailed out. (At that time we had to get some petty cash from the Booking Office to buy several sheets of stamps, and the details would all be entered in a large book for Audit purposes). I think an Administrative charge was added to the total owed ? I don't remember what the success rate was in recovering monies owed, but we did get some results. If a certain individual seemed to be racking up a lot of unpaid fares it was passed along to another department for possible court proceedings.
Many years later I had moved to another job and got called as a witness for the prosecution in the case of a frequent Fare Dodger. On a particularly snowy January day I had to make an an 80 mile journey to Hatfield Local Court, along with about half a dozen other railway staff witnesses, all having been given a paid day off to attend. As it turned out the person decided to plead guilty and was fined, without one of the witnesses having been called to say a word.
I used to go to school on East Coastway in early 80s, along with a few others and we would all have had seasons. Occasionally the season ticket would get forgotten. I seem to recall the guard issued a slip and took details and you got (or parents did) a latter requiring verification - prob the season tickt number or such - that had to be sent back to BR, or maybe shown at the local station ticket office. Can not recall any punitive fine for this, but it may be an admin fee was levied. No doubt a parent would have paid that if there was. Must surely have been some disincentive to keep forgetting your season. I guess the process for children may have been more lenient / flexible perhaps.

Not sure how we would have got through barrier to start with, as usually staffed, now I think about it.
 

GRALISTAIR

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1972 I was doubly bad. I took a day off school without permission and got a platform ticket onto the station at Preston. I then got the train to Crewe. I was caught and told a lie but the guard said my story did not make sense. I ended up paying the fare on the train and nothing more was said.
 

ainsworth74

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Not sure how we would have got through barrier to start with, as usually staffed, now I think about it.

Was this the sort of barrier where you just flashed something ticket shaped at a guy in a booth? They still had those at Leeds when I first started using trains a lot in the mid-00s and I definitely got through (always with a valid ticket!) waving various different ticket shaped objects (including a bite card at least once) plus when it was busy there was no way in hell they were actually looking at everyone waving things in their direction.
 

WesternLancer

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Was this the sort of barrier where you just flashed something ticket shaped at a guy in a booth? They still had those at Leeds when I first started using trains a lot in the mid-00s and I definitely got through (always with a valid ticket!) waving various different ticket shaped objects (including a bite card at least once) plus when it was busy there was no way in hell they were actually looking at everyone waving things in their direction.
Yes, it was, but at the times of day concerned, and the stations involved, it would not have been so busy and the staff (knowing kids would be potentially more likely to fare dodge maybe) would look at the ticket.

and when boarding they actually clipped the ticket with a punch so not just a question of flashing it.

When leaving they took the ticket off you, unless it was a season ticket- that were bigger card and easier to read. In my latter school years photocards were introduced so you needed that too.

Not like a big city station where volumes of people could be much bigger in terms of those passing through the gateline, where no doubt what you say might work.
 

AY1975

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Whilst it's true that most stations were still barriered in the 70s, many small stations, especially suburban, small town and rural stations, were only staffed by one person who was booking office clerk, ticket collector and station supervisor all in one.

Where that was the case, the one member of staff would be in the ticket office most of the time, meaning that it was the responsibility of the passenger to ensure that they bought a ticket before boarding a train, and whenever a train arrived, the same member of staff would stand by the exit to examine or collect the tickets of disembarking passengers (or collect their fares if they had not bought a ticket before or during their journey, whether they hadn't allowed enough time to do so or had boarded at a station that was unstaffed or where the ticket office was closed).

In some cases, where non-gangwayed DMUs or EMUs called at unstaffed stations, paying on arrival at your destination was the usual way to pay your fare if there wasn't a Travelling Ticket Inspector on board your train. I seem to recall that this usually happened for passengers boarding at Morden Road or Waddon Marsh on the Wimbledon-West Croydon line when it was a heavy rail line, for example.

Also, London King's Cross and Paddington had one platform at the far left-hand side of the main trainshed that was unbarriered: Platform 1 at Paddington (which remains unbarriered to this day) and Platform 8 at King's Cross. Presumably those platforms were used only by long-distance trains that had on-board Travelling Ticket Inspectors (and by charter trains and Sleeper trains where a member of staff would check all passengers' tickets on boarding).

In about the mid to late '70s the Two Ronnies did a series called "Stop, You're Killing Me", which was set on a farm in a fictional Devon village called Drake's Bottom. In the first episode they travel down there, presumably from London, in a Mark 1 compartment, and shortly after boarding they realise that they haven't bought tickets, so one of them hides in the toilet and pretends to have both their tickets when the inspector comes round, and the inspector knocks on the toilet door and asks "Are you Dunn?" (because the other one says his name is Dunn) and he says no not yet, and they get away with it!

In the next episode you see them alighting from a Southern Region DEMU at a station masquerading as Drakes Halt but I think it's actually Groombridge on the Tunbridge Wells-Eridge line (now the Spa Valley Railway). As they alight and come out of the station they say it's a good job that they got away with it or they would have had to pay full fare.
 

thedbdiboy

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Ah, the dreaded 4407 pads....as stated above, the general principle was that tickets were inspected manually on entrance/exit to platforms. The system was not particularly effective because at busy times pretty much anything could be flashed and would get through. If you didn't have a ticket you were supposed to pay at the barrier and be issued a 4407 receipt. A lot of times the receipt didn't get issued and the reconciliation of those books was a nightmare, with perhaps half the barrier takings being entered and the other half going in the tea fund/the 4:30 at Kempton Park or whatever.
Every so often 'revenue' might do a proper block on a station - this was as much about identifying staff fraud as public fraud as it would set a benchmark for what should be going though the books.
 

Tryfan

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Loughborough station in the 70’s used to have an unlocked wooden box for passengers to put their used tickets in when exiting the station. We would stop off there often just to see what was in there. I remember finding a 1st class ticket from London that was still in date and had not been gripped, guessing it was the return portion of an open return. There were no barriers at St Pancras so just a case of avoiding the ticket inspection. On my second journey it got gripped and that was the end of my first class travel for some time.

My local station, Long Eaton, had a team of three that worked as ticket clerks / inspectors. One was super efficient and rarely missed a trick, the second was far less enthusiastic about collecting tickets and wouldn’t bother us whilst the third was the junior team member and would become overly eager if he was being supervised by either of the other two. All three were there for a long time. One of them only recently stopped working there. So must’ve done 45 years service.
 

contrex

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Loughborough station ... My local station, Long Eaton
My father's side of the family comes from Castle Donington. In the 1960s I told my uncle about little-used South London stations issuing tickets where the destination was hand written (e.g. East Brixton to ____________________ ). Uncle told me that the station at Donington used to do that, and during World War 2 it was broken into and a large number of blank-destination tickets taken, and subsequently passed around and used by lots of people.
 

D6130

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Uncle told me that the station at Donington used to do that, and during World War 2 it was broken into and a large number of blank-destination tickets taken, and subsequently passed around and used by lots of people.
In my days as a BR guard, paper tickets had to be issued using double-sided carbon paper to avoid the possibility of any such fraud as this.
 

Gloster

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I think that every station would have blanks like these as there just wasn’t room, even in the largest booking office, for every possible ticket to be kept in stock. Tickets for all regular destinations would be kept in the rack: most were obvious flows, but there could be oddities, such as between a local factory and the company’s head office in another part of the country. All other tickets would have to be calculated and then written out on blanks, but there could be a few semi-regular flows that had to be issued on blanks, but where the fare was remembered or written down on a piece of paper.

Passing round stolen blanks was a bit risky as the numbers of the missing tickets would probably be known. If a Travelling Ticket Inspector, etc. spotted a ticket from the missing batch, the holder would probably be up before the magistrates and it would not help them if they wouldn’t say where they got the ticket. And yes, TTIs did remember such things, even in a World War. During my period on clerical work while green carded, there was a guard who frequently had to be booked for court attendance as he was able to remember the serial numbers of stolen tickets that had been listed on the internal circulars, amongst other useful abilities.
 

Cheshire Scot

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In my days as a BR guard, paper tickets had to be issued using double-sided carbon paper to avoid the possibility of any such fraud as this.
The subtle difference between paper tickets and blank card tickets being that paper tickets should as you say be issued using double sided carbon paper whereas the issue of blank cards would be recorded showing ticket number, destination and fare. Either might the be checked by audit against collected tickets.

I recall a vacancy arose after one not so smart chap got found out by audit after inserting a piece of paper between the carbon paper and what should have been the carbon copy paper ticket and after the sale place that paper on top of the double sided carbon to record a different destination with a lower fare and pocketing the difference.
 
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