[original thread on uk.railway]
[x-posted to uk.transport.london]

On 9 Feb, 09:36, Great Eastern wrote:

Nick W wrote:
I'd quite like to now how they're going to barrier Ipswich without major
demolition or having an unsatisfactory system like Loughborough.

They've clearly not learned from Romford, which is an unsatisfactory
system crammed in a smaller space than Ipswich with the ticket office
not even being at the same level...and now they are coming back to alter it!

Unless it's changed lately, the other issue about Romford is that the
(non-standard) automatic gates can't handle Oyster cards at all -
holders of Travelcards loaded on Oyster thus have to go to the manual
side gate and be let through after presented their cards to the
gateline staff and having them checked by a card reader (though I'm
sure they don't always do this, especially when it's busy).

This situation is hardly ideal now, but when Oyster Pay-as-you-go is
eventually accepted on all National Rail routes in London (hopefully
by the year's end, but we will see!) then it would basically become
unworkable.

So perhaps part of the motivation behind the upcoming work is to
install 'standard' (CTS) gates so as to deal with this situation. That
said I dare say it's possible to retrofit the existing gates with
Oyster readers, but it sounds as though revisiting the whole current
arrangement and altering it is a good idea.