Fine for £3.60 ticket

[Jim the Jim]

Online tickets give you more flexibility, not less. You can buy them anywhere at any time prior to boarding (provided you have a suitable internet connection), unlike paper tickets which you have to buy/collect from the station or order sufficiently well in advance to have them delivered. This idea that poor hard-done-by passengers in a rush can't possibly get their ticket till they're already on the train - I'm not buying it. In the online world getting a ticket before you board is easier than ever before.

"Buy a ticket before you get on" isn't that complicated. At a largeish station like Meadowhall, ticket machines and offices are prominent and there will be plenty of signs to remind you of the rules. Let's not pretend that for every well-meaning person who somehow genuinely fails to buy a ticket from Meadowhall to Sheffield, there aren't a hundred chancers who are going to use "but my phone wouldn't connect!" as their perfect excuse.

 

[spag23]

If the TOCs were to allow "My phone wouldn't connect" as a mitigation for being ticketless, surely they would also have to accept other excuses equally outside their control, eg "I couldn't pay at the starting station office or machine, because I'd left my credit cards and cash at home."
Myself, I order online before I set out, and collect a paper ticket from the machine (having first copied the emailed reference number onto a piece of paper. No faith in mobiles!)

 

[Evelynm]

It should be made an offence to board a train without a ticket in this day and age where there are numerous ways to buy a ticket.

 

[SCDR_WMR]

Do you mean that a passenger can be penalty fared by buying a ticket for a delayed train after its scheduled departure time, but before its actual departure time? I travel on delayed train a lot which I only enter the station after the scheduled departure time.

Our scanner app has live departure information on it so only flags as 'purchased after departure' if it was after the actual departure time, not the planned time.

Currently we don't engage too much in those issues (unlike RPMs) but I think there will be a push for this to be done going forward unfortunately.

 

[Hadders]

It should be made an offence to board a train without a ticket in this day and age where there are numerous ways to buy a ticket.

It already is an offence. There does have to be certain caveats, for example no-one should be compelled to have a mobile phone or bank account to use a train.

 

[island]

It should be made an offence to board a train without a ticket in this day and age where there are numerous ways to buy a ticket.

It has been for many years.