Top excuses for Fare Evasion on Translink NI Railways services

[Traincustomer]

Translink NI Railways has revealed some of the most outrageous excuses used by passengers attempted to travel without paying for their tickets!

http://www.translink.co.uk/Services/...ways-services/

(Came across this just now. Piece was published on NI Railways site just in the week gone by. I think this is the best forum in which to place it)

[comcor]

"I just bought this ticket before I got on the train, your machines must be wrong" (Customer with an out-of-date ticket)

I find this an interesting one having fallen victim to a similar incident myself in The Netherlands.

In my case, I was supposed to get fined, but I was so determined about it that I made the inspector return to the machine (I was still on the platform waiting for my train) to prove that the machine was issuing tickets with the wrong date.

Had I been stopped later in my journey, I'm not sure what I could have done, short of pointing out that the ticket was in fairly pristine condition for one that was supposedly issued in 1970.

So, while that kind of incident doesn't happen often, it can happen.

As for me, I check my ticket when it's issued now.

[Mark Gleeson]

Given NIR don't have TVM's the story doesn't stack up

Fare evasion is low in NIR due to conductors on each train

[Concerned Worker]

Do Translink have a Conductor on every service ?

[Thomas Ralph]

Originally Posted by Concerned Worker

Do Translink have a Conductor on every service ?

Definitely on all NI Railways branded services. Not 100% sure about the Enterprise.

[Mark Gleeson]

Every train, it down to Translink not having the safety equipment to operate driver only.

Probably also down to the fact NIR has been operated by a bus company for 30 years, very few stations have the ability to be staffed

[Inniskeen]

NIR have no ambitions for one man operation whether or not they have the requisite safety equipment. The conductor collects revenue, acts as a customer service agent and performs guard duties. It is a very effective model which also acts as a check on anti-social behaviour and vandalism. It is a model Irish Rail could emulate to their advantage.

The major stations are normally staffed, particularly on the Derry and Dublin lines. Other locations are staffed at times of heavy passenger flow, notably during the morning peak.

As for being run by a bus company for 30 years, you are somewhat mistaken as Translink is a far more recent entity than that.

[Thomas Ralph]

There's nothing wrong with two-man operation, in fact NI Railways does it very well. At each station the driver releases the doors, guard steps out watches where people have gotten on, then closes the other doors, checks everyone is clear, steps in, closes his own door, and goes off to check/sell tickets for people who got on.

[DundalkStudent]

Originally Posted by Inniskeen

The major stations are normally staffed, particularly on the Derry and Dublin lines. Other locations are staffed at times of heavy passenger flow, notably during the morning peak.

I couldn't believe the state of affairs the last time I had to travel from Belfast. I needed to get the train from Botanic @ Queens to Belfast Central and then the enterprise the whole way down to meet my Dundalk monthly to dublin Connolly.

Staffing: 1st let me say that I like ticket machines. I don't like doing people out of a job but when you're in a rush and you don't have questions, they can speed you up. Plus every train service in the western world has them, let's face the real world here. The staff at Botanic poured over my IE student card before telling me it wasn't valid for internal NI travel which I had forgotten but all of this is eating up time. They had to confer between themselves a number of times. Then started giving me grief over my fold up bike: it's up to the conductor as to whether he'll let you on. So I had to pay full whack and then fold up the bike in a hurry. Needless to say I missed my train and the enterprise I was looking to get. When I got on the train? Beautiful new, clean trains, but almost empty! And other people just walked on with regular bikes, not a bother! What was the point of all that?

In Belfast Central, 5 people checking tickets coming off from 2 exit points, that's right, 5. Any machines for buying tickets, no. 2 windows open and luckily short queue. No wifi either or coffee shop nearby with wifi. Station is on top of a bridge over all the tracks, so nothing around, I had to cycle 10 minutes.

The total cost: single botanic adult to Central and single student Belfast to Dundalk = same price as online fare Belfast to Connolly. Could I buy any of the tickets I needed online? No. If I had bought a web fare from Belfast to Connolly and cycled to Central, I would have made my train for the same money and encountered less stress.

I know Northern Ireland priorities are always the Eastern European model of must give people jobs but they're going to find the withdrawals hard as "the mainland" pulls funding, ie the moving of motor tax to Swansea.

I wonder what the stats would show if you compared the financials, Translink's vs IE. I bet NI gets a lot more subsidy for the train sizes, duration, distance & passenger numbers. IE updating with all the ticket machines, TVMs, cost reduction programs, ability to operate 1 driver per train, etc., has made them a much tighter ship and better able to weather the reduction in subsidies. Plus it's nice for the tax payer and even nicer for the banks and their bailouts.

NI civil service type areas are going to start incurring drops in funding as "London" stops throwing money at it now that peace is here. If they don't start implementing the kinds of models rolled out by IE, that's going to end up in big fare increases for everyone up there.

Making a long story even longer, I wouldn't be in a hurry to knock IE's progress here.