Fares and Ticketing

Oyster, ESAF, fares and other ticketing issues

Ticketing Troubles

Arnos Grove station staff are shocked and angry that management have suspended a workmate for a minor ticket office discrepancy. The staff member concerned has more than fifteen years on the job and six years doing ticket office duties without any problems, and yet the company has thrown the book at...

Further adventures with Code 36

Management appear to have accepted that stopping passengers leaving the station with a code 36 until staff intervene is not working. Gates at 15 stations have been modified to have a lower exit threshold, meaning someone with “insufficient PAYG” can exit. If this trial is successful it will be made...

Stop London Overground Ticket Office Closures!

Following in London Underground's footsteps, London Overground now plans to close nearly all its ticket offices.

Fifty-one are scheduled to close, although the plan has the small matter of a public consultation to navigate first. We know from bitter experience that cuts-driven decision-makers are...

Your Money Back?

LU says too many customers are having too much money refunded to their Oyster cards. LU is now monitoring station staff. It has produced a league table to help management identify whether "the same people" are "always" doing refunds.

What is this meant to prove? That some staff like to help when...

Cash Out

London Underground has not provided enough training to station staff on how to handle cash from the ticket machines since ticket offices closed.

Money piles up in the machines because too few staff are trained on how to take it out. LU brought in new snazzy Cash Handling Devices (CHD), and barely...

Luco Loco at Oxo

A rather dystopian, if garishly-coloured, vision of TfL/LU's corporate, semi-privatised future at Oxford Circus today, as wealthy sugar merchants Lucozade ran a promotion offering free bottles with a contactless chip worth one free Tube journey embedded in the bottom.

It has long been an ambition...

I Spy RCIs?

Revenue Control Inspectors (RCIs) have increasingly been working in full uniform, whereas many operations were previously undertaken in plain clothes. LU's aim is clear: by putting more uniformed staff on stations, they're attempting to mask the impact of their job cuts. It makes it more difficult...

TMS Stress

Ticket Machine Servicing (TMS) training is now a compulsory aspect of the CSA2 training programme at Ashfield House. That means LU is saving £13,000 per year per worker graduating from that course: CSA2s are being paid £23k p/a to do work that a SAMF used to get £36k for. It's an almighty con....

More tales from the trenches

Ticket machine training for station staff is going terribly. With less than three weeks to 3 April, over 55% of people who require TMS training still haven’t being trained. One thing that will make training much harder is that SAMFs who are currently training others, also week by week more and more...

Falling at the First Hurdle

As management push CSAs through the sausage machine of TSID (ticket-selling) training, they are coming up against a major obstacle - up to 80% of trainees are failing.

Perhaps this is because the course is condensed into two days. But perhaps it is also because most CSAs never wanted to be ticket...

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