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.

There are a number of problems I’ve had with them:

1) when something goes wrong, there’s no big red “help” button.
2) you need to know exactly what ticket you want, but there’s no information available at the platform explaining what the differences are, or when peak/off peak is, just the ominous warning that tickets are only valid according to conditions which you can’t check.
3) there’s a machine near me where the “receipt” button doesn’t work (but it’s a touch screen and that part of the screen seems to work just fine). I’ve reported it, but no change (the machine on the opposite platform quite happily prints receipts).
4) If you want to buy a ticket for an unaccompanied teenager and the machine’s not working, you’d better hope there’s a cash machine nearby.
5) And seriously, when do they ever actually work?

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’