In message , at 02:33:01
on Sun, 10 Aug 2014, remarked:
http://issuu.com/abelliogroup/docs/o...july___for_int

- take a look at page 5 to get a tiny glimpse of what is being planned
by Abellio Greater Anglia for SEFT / ITSO.

The Bluetooth ticketing option is a new one on me.

Apparently this allows an App on a smartphone to buy e-tickets
wirelessly in a suitably equipped station.

Just what we need, another balkanised technology to add to Oyster, ITSO,
Contactless, barcodes, NFC-on-phone and of course GSM and Wifi already
contacting booking sites from smartphones.

But it has attractions for a station operator because it means people
travelling from there can be constrained to using that TOC's booking
engine and not the one they normally use (unless these facilities are
ruled to be something akin to an "Impartial Point of Sale" allowing
access to all booking engines, which seems unlikely).

Of course, that begs the question of whether these "Bluetooth tickets"
from your friendly local GA station will be available for routes off-GA,
which could be as popularly mundane as Cambridge-King Cross. (ie Kings
Cross, and quite soon all of Thameslink, would have to be fitted out to
accept them).

In the mean time, it's a welcome addition to my V*p**rw*r* list.

Interesting. Roland will also be pleased to see the plans for gates at Ely
on page 7. /-)

The station is so shallow that I struggle to see how they could put
barriers inside, even if they widen the ticket office area. Currently
there are significant people-jams when trains arrive from the south in
the late afternoon, which take ages to clear because of the narrow doors
from the platform and outdoors. (Not helped by the extra footprint used
by passengers with bikes, many of which are retrieved from racks on the
platform and are therefore doomed to make two trips a day through the
barriers).

The commonplace queues inside the ticket office also serve to obstruct
people-flows like that.

From a purely engineering perspective the best place to put the barriers
would be in a little compound on the platform, like they have at
Grantham:

http://www.nationalrail.co.uk/SME/html/NRE_GRA/plan.html?rtnloc=GRA

http://www.nationalrail.co.uk/SME/ht...s/1964-0030025
..html

Although the peak flow capacity at Ely would still be questionable.

The effect on trainspotters, and people accessing the shop/cafe on the
platform, while not actually travelling, is simply something that's been
caught in the crossfire all over the network
--
Roland Perry