Train ticket machines have gone off the rails

Machines cant offer you “web only” tickets ( Virgin online offered me a “web only” ticket when all the Advance tickets had been sold at the same price).
You cant use your Refund vouchers at machines .
Ticket Office opening times seem random at our local station.
So much for the “ticket machines can provide you with any ticket” statement seen at the station.

The most annoying thing about ticket machines is their inability to sell season tickets for anything but specific calendar periods, e.g. one week, one month etc. It is nearly always cheaper to add extra days to a monthly ticket so that it ends on a Friday, otherwise those additional days have to be bought at an expensive daily ticket rate instead of the monthly rate. This necessitates a visit to the ticket office where they can sell season tickets for any period between one month and a year.

There is consistency either – Southeastern’s seems to be fairly straightforward but I missed trains at Gatwick trying to get through Southern’s complicated menus. And it wasn’t just me – I was most embarrassed at Shoreham-by-sea station when some German friends ended up paying about three times what I had for my (already purchased) return as the machine would not seem to offer the cheap single off-peak fare to London. Checking on the web revealed it should have been sold, but the machine would not cooperate.

I think one option may be to use apps that allow you to collect tickets from machine. It’s the only way I am able to buy extensions to my London travelcard, which again, cannot be bought from machines unless you want to end up paying for zones already covered by your travelcard.

Neither ticket machines nor the web sites sell tickets from London zone boundaries, you have to use a booking office.

A simple example is if you have an all-zones season ticket and want to go to Cambridge. A Boundary Zone 6 – Cambridge return will let you travel there and back by either route. All you can do on a machine or the web is book from the last station in zone 6, somewhere like Enfield Lock, which ties you to travelling via Liverpool St; in theory the train must call at that station, and the fare is slightly higher too.

I have long asked why this can’t be rectified. Given that all everything uses the same ATOC fares manual it would be a matter of moments to add these notional stations to the system, but can never get a sensible reply beyond ‘we’ll look into it’

The peak/off-peak thing gets me every time – I know there are certain tickets that I can’t use at certain times, but not being able to find out what these times are really frustrates me.

By far my most common gripe, though, is that the station I use most frequently has only one ticket machine. It’s a popular commuter station, and heading into London during rush hour means you can end up queuing for 15 minutes at the single machine. I’d go to the ticket office, but there’s an equally huge queue there, and often the ticket office is just closed with no explanation. I buy a weekly travel card and try to get things in advance where possible, but on the few times it’s caught me out it’s been really frustrating – can’t imagine how much worse it is for the people who aren’t familiar with the station or the area!

I used to have similar frustrations at Waterloo station as they never seemed to have enough ticket machines, but they’ve now added lots more, with the rather amusing result that the machines which are immediately visible from the tube exits are always heaving with people, but the machines around the other side are queue-free!

Machines are made so complicate that large number of passengers avoids buying tickets. One single mistake will build up tension and day ruins and upset your travel plan.
This is the main reason; passenger would prefer to buy ticket from ticket window. We can see big queues at all stations as passenger do not have any confidence to operate ticket machine.
Rail companies like to make complicate machine to trap travellers for their single mistake
Simplified fares, remove peak and off peak tickets will make machine more customer friendly.

Oyster style smartcard schemes in the other metropolitan areas would help matters. Vast numbers of tickets are walk-on short distance cash fares. In London Oyster has made an excellent job of simplifying this and getting you the cheapest fare for the trip and time of day.

I take my bike on First Great Western trains into London every now and then. I use the machines to collect tickets not buy them but the system is not consistent. In the past year I’ve had to follow three different procedures:
1. Collect my ticket and my cycle ticket from the machine (preferable).
2. Collect my ticket and my cycle ticket from the window (bearable).
3. Collect my ticket from the machine and the cycle ticket from the window (delayed me so much I missed my train).