Barry Salter wrote:
On Sat, 8 Apr 2006 18:08:29 +0100, Edward Cowling London UK
wrote:

In message , Dowager
writes

To add insult to (potential financial) injury, the ticket inspector was
apparently pretty damned rude and intransigent, and wouldn't listen to any
sort of reasoned argument. Bloody jobsworths...


I would have been 100% behind you until they had a random mob handed
inspection at my local station the other week. It's Palmers Green and I
arrived there about two Mondays ago to find all the regulars I travel
with moping about outside the station and looking less than pleased. The
reason? Mob handed ticket inspectors.

I can do a couple of examples of "mob handed" ticket inspectors for you:

First up, we have the inspector who checked a ticket on board a train,
which was fine, but he caught a glimpse of the corner of a Permit to
Travel in the wallet too, so he asked to see it. Said PTT had been
obtained from a station on a totally different TOC, and the punter had a
valid ticket for the train he was on, yet the RPI still PFed the punter
in question.


This needs a bit of explaining. Do you mean that the passenger started
the journey the same day on a different TOC and only bought a ticket
for the last bit?

If there was time to buy a ticket for the last bit, it's a very
different situation from if, say, the latter was a season and the
passenger had intended to get a ticket for the first bit of the journey
at the first station, without time to queue at the interchange.

In previous threads, it's been suggested that you can pay up for the
PTT at the end of the full journey, even if you have changed TOC
halfway.

Because my beef with the fragmented system is knowing what to do if you
turn up with half an hour to spare at, say, Dunton Green, intending to
buy a ticket for a journey to Winchester, knowing that there won't be
time to queue at Waterloo, but the office at Dunton Green is closed.
Other posters have suggested that a PTT from Dunton Green would work
all the way to Winchester.



Then we have the one who withdrew a Gold Card a couple of weeks after it
had been issued as the passenger didn't produce a photocard to support
it and was generally abusive. When the inspector investigated further,
it transpired that it wasn't the (male) passenger's Gold Card at all,
but a female passenger's.

Cheers,

Barry

--
Barry Salter, barry at southie dot me dot uk
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