I'm sure they have, but that is a cost of business. That investment would still have been made even if, subsequently, it turns out that all their customers are as honest as the day is long and they didn't catch another fare evader all day long.
You remind me of a pet food ad on the TV many years ago, with the scientific rationale for it being nutritionally perfect delivered by an actress in a white lab coat given the title Dr Sandra Zinga (or similar). A couple of years later a new boy joined the team at work. Name of Zinga. Oh, says I, unusual name, reminds me of [the TV ad]. Ah, says he, yes, that's my wife, she is a researcher at [world's largest petfood company].
PoCA has extremely wide applicability!
Sadly, the nature of our legal system is that you will very, very rarely be able to recover the cost of defending yourself against a charge for a crime you haven't committed even if it leads to a lengthy trial with the potential of a lengthy prison sentence if found guilty. In the cases we see here, most are for people who would be found guilty in court and we try to lead them to the cheapest conclusion but there are some cases where they may be able to avoid conviction on a technicality but at greater expense than a settlement.
This isn't an original thought, but it's perhaps worth bearing in mind that people who post here looking for help are the people who have run into problems. People who have had no problems don't post here: people who have had problems which have been resolved by the railwayperson telling them not to worry about it very rarely post here.
Not in my book it is a cost of dishonesty and the dishonest should contribute.
If no dishonest people existed, the railway would still need to have a mechanism for checking tickets.
But they wouldn’t need the significant cost of the back office dealing with cases.
Exactly, basic ticket checks, gates and so on are part of the cost for everyone, RPIs, back office, prosecutors etc are only needed for the dishonest. I think the real objection here is people being allowed to pay 1000s to get out of fraud charges, not paying £150 becuse they got caught doing low level evasion that would cost the public purse far more to prosecute.
My objections are to both.
Back in the 90s the friendly guard would walk down the train and sell you a ticket from his little hand-held machine. He'd get a bit of commission, the railway got their revenue, you'd get your ticket, happy days for all. And- here's the thing- people would be less able to 'forget' their railcard or 'accidentally' buy a child ticket, because the guard would query it when he was selling you the ticket.
Just out of interest - did you used to pay when there was no guard or machines etc or did you ever leave without paying your fare?
How could you? The only way to pay for a ticket in those days was to hand the cash over to a human. So if you've boarded a train at an unstaffed station and the guard doesn't come through then you've had no opportunity. Of course if you are particularly public-spirited you would actively seek out the guard, you certainly wouldn't deliberately board at the front of the train to improve your chances of being missed.
I was just interested. Was it not a strict liability offence to board without a ticket in the 90s?
Not where you've not had the opportunity to pay. Paytrains were introduced in the late 1960s, and of course some lines (often operating railmotors) had the guard selling tickets long before that.
Thanks for that - appreciated. I was about in the 90s but did not understand all of that.
No, cheques haven’t been an acceptable form of payment for many years, since the cheque guarantee limit was abolished. (Except for season tickets with a company cheque).
It wasn't. Then as now, if you board at a station with no facilities you had and still have the right to buy onboard. What has changed is that far fewer stations have no facilities, thanks to the development of TVMs, so the "there was no where to buy at the station" doesn't wash like it once did.
Technically yes, but back then there was no financial penalty attached to a breach, I think for the historical reasons below - and so prosecution served no purpose. (I continue to fail to understand how the current versions of this byelaw have avoided similar challenges.)
Although it has made some guards lazier. With fewer fares to collect a lot simply don't bother at all (London Northwestern looking at you) ticket sales must imply many full trains are, in fact, empty.
Loads of times I either could not pay or paid on the way back, I've also had free rides you would not expect (memorably St Pancras to St Albans early one morning where the ticket office was shut, there were no machines back then and the guard was not a conductor who said 'you will have a free ride' and the other end was pretty much deserted). It was also common here in Kent to only pay whatever you put in the PTT machine because the guard could not get through 12 coaches. You can't be expected to pay if no reasonable opportunity was given but nowadays there is little excuse most of the time.
