DanNCL
Established Member
I agree. As was evidenced in the consulatation they ran on the (now ditched) May 2022 timetable change, LNER seem to have forgotten that they don't solely exist as a means of getting people to/from London, and whilst London may well be their largest passenger flow, they do have to cater for the other passenger flows to an acceptable standard too. The issue with the LNER TVMs requiring a train to be selected and for that train to have either a seat or counted place reservation available also stops people from selecting XC services. It means if you want to go from Newcastle to any station North of Morpeth, there are regularly instances where it's completely impossible to get a ticket from the TVM for it, as all of the trains are "sold out". It's less of an issue for Newcastle - York as you can select a TPE service to get the TVM to issue the ticket, but it's still a right pain, and has been putting people off from using the train. Arriva must be loving the amount of extra custom their X15 and X18 buses have been getting out of this!I'd just add my dissatisfaction to the current set-up. I know the majortiy of LNER customers are long-distance travellers for whom reserving a seat will often be a priority, but passengers doing short-hops reamin part of their usesr as well, and as it stands the TVMs are not user-friendly for someone who is showing up at a station and wanting a simple day-return to leave on the next train, and return on a train at whatever time they happen to have finished.
eg the TVM won't sell a ticket for a train departing within 5 minutes. I've found myself making bookings on trains that I have no intention of getting in order to make the TVM sell me a ticket - that's not a good set-up. I can only imagine it putting off more infrequent/less rail-nerdy passengers.
I hope this can be resolved fairly swiftly as passenger numbers are clearly ramping up.
I should add that the ticket office at Newcastle regularly refuses to issue walk up tickets when there aren't any counted places left free on the specific service that the customer requests, which the customer is often asked to select by the ticket office staff. We know they can issue those tickets, but some of the staff (and I should emphasise that it is only some of them, it's not all of them) frequently refuse. This will not be helping passenger numbers.
A further issue with the LNER set up at Newcastle station, although this has been an issue since the East Coast era, is that there is no facility for those using Pop pay-as-you-go for travel to Heworth or Sunderland to touch in or out, effectively preventing people from using a valid ticket on that journey. Heworth and Sunderland have facilities for passengers to touch in and out when using pay as you go on Northern, it's just Newcastle Central that doesn't.
Why do walk up tickets need the same restrictions on them as the advances with regards to the booking headway? Is it really that difficult to set it up in the fares database so that the advance fares simply disappear at the 5 minute deadline, with reservations for those trains with walk ups remaining available? I get that these things can't be changed overnight but I'd have thought there's been enough time by now to implement something like that.The 5 minute booking headway is to stop people booking on a train they haven’t a chance of catching remember it’s not just walk up tickets that the TVMs retail.How would you feel if you bought an Advance ticket for a train in 4 minutes time and by the time you got to the platform the doors were closed And your ticket was worthless. The TVMs can’t possibly be all things to all people.
If that's an issue then set the deadline for the relevant advance tickets for 10 minutes instead of 5. For those on walk up tickets it's a non-issue as their ticket is valid on the next train, and it's the customer's responsibility to ensure they arrive at the station with sufficient time to catch their train anyway.So could you guarantee every customer can make the train remember at the larger stations the TVMs are quite some way from departure platforms. There is a very very small number of tickets that you can set up for that option most of our TVMs already have these set up for non LNER flows as these are the majority of tickets they sell.