There USED to be massive queues at the start of the month, yeah. But
they brought in new, better, faster, multifunction, reliable,
multilingual ticket machines, and ****loads of them, and the queuing
problem really just disappeared.

Good point. Does anyone know if you can load an Oyster with a monthly
at a ticket machine (rather than via the Internet)? If not, it'd be
about time you could...

At that point (and now I'm going to be controversial) could ticket
offices effectively be replaced by roving assistance staff in smaller
numbers and Oyster-issuing machines? Make the tickets transferrable
(as they are in some European countries - why not?) and the issuing of
photocards becomes no issue either...

They may do now, but they didn't then, though there are not huge numbers
of ticket windows (no need for them). What LUL is doing now is more or
less what the RATP did about ten years ago...

The number of ticket offices at LUL stations does surprise me, compared
with most European systems. Then again, high ticket office staffing
seems a curiously British thing - Merseyrail is fully staffed
throughout service except for 4 stations that have never had staff
(which is a waste of money), and mainline stations still haven't
managed to go over to machines as the primary means of on-the-day
ticket issuing as they quite easily could (and have in some other
countries e.g. the Netherlands).

Neil