Quote:
Originally Posted by James Howard
The patchwork nature of TVM availability, booking office opening and credit card facilities is crazy. How is a tourist supposed to know how (or indeed if) he can pay for a ticket?
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Quite so. In the UK there is a franchise standard that all booking offices, TVMs, and guards must be able to accept Visa, MasterCard, UK Maestro, American Express, and JCB. And they do — the guards all carry around little Chip & PIN machines. Contrast this to Ireland, where credit card acceptance on-train is at best non-existent and at worst a ticket checker writing down people's card details on a scrap of paper and processing them later. Unless you're on an NIR-crewed Enterprise, as they carry card terminals (and accept American Express, which IÉ does not, but not Laser).
In the interest of tourists, IÉ should have card acceptance facilities at all staffed stations (you only need a phone line, which they all have).
A point I've also made several times before is that there is a large hole in ticket purchasing rules for where a passenger wants to purchase a ticket from a TVM-only station but the TVM doesn't sell the ticket (perhaps it's a season ticket, a ticket from another station, 16-25 Railcard ticket, whatever). Irish passengers are left in legal limbo and are faced with the choice of paying more than they need to or attempting to buy on train or at destination and risking a €100 fine.
Quote:
Originally Posted by James Howard
In really cold weather it was kind of handy having the booking office open as you could get hot water from the toilet to clear the car windscreen when the inside had frozen but I guess that this isn't a core part of the service.
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You really shouldn't use hot water, as Colm mentions. Cold water will be fine.