Except for when you press it and it doesn't load within a few seconds, so you press it again and then it does two presses and advances you to something else.

Or when you've never used that specific service before and you have to work out which ticket to pick when it offers about 7billion different types.

Do I want the super saver student supreme or the sassy student mega massive ticket?

>>14085
They take fucking ages to respond though, and when you press the buttons, because it's invariably 'adapted to suit your viewing angle' it ends up pressing another button.

It's like nobody used them before installing them anywhere.

To be fair, the problem clearly isn't the people using the machines, as the insufferable idiots invariably end up harassing the ticket office staff instead. Most of the time when I'm using them, it'll take me about 5-10 seconds to order up the ticket I need - this is because I vaguely know my way around the ticketing rules. Having spend a few seconds selecting my ticket, I then have to spend what seems like an eternity trying to pay for the fucking thing.
>Sorry, I'm not taking that tenner unless you remove all the creases and then guess the correct orientation, which I'm not going to tell you, and probably isn't the same as the machine next to me.
>Oh, you wanted to pay with pound coins? Here, let me randomly reject some of them for no reason whatsoever.
>Paying with shrapnel? Oh, goody! When you're about 20p short of the total, I'm going to stop accepting any of your coins of any denomination.
Fine, I'll pay with a card, only to be told I inserted my card a millisecond too early or too late so now I have to start the entire fucking process again, or if I make a keying error on the tiny PIN pad I can't just clear it and re-enter without cancelling the entire transaction.

Why are those machines so bad? Surely it costs next to nothing, the booth must be mainly air anyway, it's not like it takes much computing power, yet it NEVER FUCKING RESPONDS.

>>14097
>it's not like it takes much computing power
You'd be wrong on that one. British rail ticketing is notoriously complex. For instance, you can travel from St Albans to London on a (considerably cheaper) ticket from Watford, but even though the ticket staff are supposed to sell you the cheapest appropriate ticket for your journey, you'll have difficulty getting either staff or machine to issue you with a ticket from Watford at St Albans.

>>14097

They're absolutely ancient. Things like ticket machines and cash machines are designed with a working life of decades, so many of them are running on badly obsolete hardware and software.

The corrupt nature of corporate procurement means that they are often very poorly designed, by people with no core expertise in building user interfaces. Designers and developers have only very weak incentives to optimise for user friendliness and speed, and strong incentives to optimise for maintenance, security and reliability. Most of the software development effort goes into making sure that the manufacturer will not get sued by the operator.

>>14102
Surely it can be done centrally at miniscule prices? Seems entirely inefficient and wasteful to me.

> For instance, you can travel from St Albans to London on a (considerably cheaper) ticket from Watford, but even though the ticket staff are supposed to sell you the cheapest appropriate ticket for your journey, you'll have difficulty getting either staff or machine to issue you with a ticket from Watford at St Albans.

What if I booked a ticket from Watford to London on the internet, then retrieved my ticket at St Albans. Would it let me through the barrier?

>>14103
>and strong incentives to optimise for maintenance, security and reliability.
I've no doubt about that, it probably makes more sense financially, but a better user interface only has to be designed once and then it's done, you can use it for a decade. Speed is a big fucker when trying to type (CANT FUCKING TYPE, WHY DOES THAT HAVE TO BE SO SLOW??) on those machines.

>>14106
>Surely it can be done centrally at miniscule prices?
Do you want to wait for the machine to dial up and find out? For some pairs of stations, the amount of data that has to be transferred over the wire is ridiculous. If they're working sensibly, then the common fares will be cached locally, but they still have to figure out whether or not travel with said fare is valid. For instance, they won't offer Anytime fares at weekends if Offpeak fares exist, though they'll still offer Offpeak fares early in the morning even if you can't get on the train right then. Either way, there's a lot of work that needs doing, and it has to be done somewhere - you can do it locally at the cost of less power, or you can do it remotely at the cost of transmission delays.

>What if I booked a ticket from Watford to London on the internet, then retrieved my ticket at St Albans.
Then you just punch in your reservation code and wait for it to print them, bypassing the awful nonsense talked about in this thread.

>(CANT FUCKING TYPE, WHY DOES THAT HAVE TO BE SO SLOW??)
That's another thing. Rather than using the same QWERTY layout that's on pretty much any keyboard in the UK, the OSKs are in alphabetical order, though I wonder if that's to slow you down so the screen can detect the presses reliably.

>>14110
>Do you want to wait for the machine to dial up and find out? For some pairs of stations, the amount of data that has to be transferred over the wire is ridiculous.
Bull, a central computer handling many calls is far more efficient, I'm certain, and no slower. It's not like the major stations won't have dedicated high speed internet connections anyway.

>Then you just punch in your reservation code and wait for it to print them, bypassing the awful nonsense talked about in this thread.
It was a parallel question, not about ticket machines, more from a cheaper fare point of view. If I lived in St Albans, saw on trainline.com that Watford-London is cheaper than St Albans - London, could I book a Watford-London train, pick it up at St Albans and would it let me through the barrier?

>>14102

The rules (codified in the National Routeing Guide (yes, it's supposed to be spelled with an E) and the National Fares Guide) run to several thousand pages. Some seemingly obvious routes are illegal, and some properly bizarre routes are permissible.

(quote (Scheme (is (rotting (my)) brain)))

>>14112

Centralisation just adds a central point of failure. If a ticket machine fails then it's no big deal, but if a central "route and fare server" were to go down or there were a network outage, then you'd have a major incident on your hands.

>>14115
Hmm, true.

>>14112
>Bull, a central computer handling many calls is far more efficient, I'm certain, and no slower.
Are you saying that from any point of authority, or just assuming?

>If I lived in St Albans, saw on trainline.com that Watford-London is cheaper than St Albans - London, could I book a Watford-London train, pick it up at St Albans and would it let me through the barrier?
If you booked a specific train and ended up with an Advance ticket, you'd have to use that specific train, with no allowance for lateness. As for the barriers, it would depend on how they're programmed, since travel validity and barrier validity are entirely independent.

They're pretty annoying if you're trying to price tickets or buy multiples. And for prebooked tickets it's even worse. Why in this day and age do I still have to type a confirmation code on a shit resistive touch screen with an ABCD keyboard? Why can't I just bloody wave my phone at the barriers yet? When it costs £200 to go from leeds to london and back you'd think they'd want more bodies through those gates faster.

>>14118

Does anyone ever travel at the full Anytime price for long-distance?

>>14119
Only when all the Advances have sold out weeks ago. That, and also when someone else is paying for it. That BBC programme canvassed the first-class section of a Manchester-London train (probably the single most eye-wateringly overpriced route on the entire network), and found pretty much everyone was travelling on a full-price first class ticket but that they either weren't paying out of pocket or were claiming it on expenses.

I always, without fail, buy the cheapest ticket. I've travelled using off-peak tickets at peak times more than I can remember. No one has ever called me on it. At least I'm not a fare dodger.

Seriously, top tip, try it. You'll save a few quid.

>>14120

But I've bought plenty of Advances with 60%+ off the day before without issue. I'm not convinced this is a real problem.

This country is shit. You should see Japan. Their machines were so easy to use. Fast, efficient, and tickets were cheap. I fucking had a teary when I landed here and had to take the train home. Expensive, wasteful, slow, useless.

>>14110
>Then you just punch in your reservation code

Not if it's been cold and/or raining!

>>14124
I didn't know they change your reservation code in inclement weather.

>>14125
The water and the cold stop the touchscreens from working. Clearly you've never had to collect a ticket reservation at some weatherbeaten one-platform rural station, you posh tart.

Luddites.

>>14126
You're right. I only travel from stations with a roof.

>>14130

No commuter wankers here.

>>14131
>Horton-in-Ribblesdale
This sounds like one of those fake place names Americans invent to take the piss.

>>14131

Piss off you southern fairy. Appleby's clearly superior.

>>14120

That. Most businesses just can't be fucked with all the potential complications of trying to use advance tickets. Some companies have incentive schemes to try and encourage their employees to save on travel, but even they will usually end up reimbursing massive quantities of full fare tickets.

Businesses don't want their employees to take the piss on their expenses, but the administrative overhead can be absolutely massive. You don't want well-paid employees pissing about justifying their expenses line-by-line, nor do you want to demean them.

It's similar to how wifi is free at a cheap B&B but £15 a day at an expensive business hotel. Most tourists would baulk at paying that much, but a businessman will just claim it on expenses. No company wants to pay for it, but they're not going to refuse to reimburse it either.

>>14132

Don't mess with Yorkshire.

>>14133

Lad.

>>14132

I was shocked when I found out Shaftsbury wasn't made up by Bill Hicks.

>>14119

I do but only when I'm not paying for it. I can only fathom anyone ever paying full price if they have travel expenses for work.

I've been increasingly directed to take domestic flights as they're sometimes cheaper. I'd quite happily be stuffed into the luggage rack of a Transpennine with a malfunctioning toilet than have to arrive at an airport an hour and a half in advance of a forty minute flight. Utterly soul crushing and you can't even bring your special brew on a plane because of Jihadis.

>>14137
Call that traction, lad? Pathetic. It's even on the wrong line and sporting a tail lamp.

>>14141

Well spotted trainlad. You're right but he question is: what's pulling the carriages and why put a dead weight engine on the rear unless shunting rearwards.

>>14156
Steam engines apparently don't like working a load backwards, especially engines with a tender. Since many places simply don't have the facility to turn them, you will often see trains with a steam engine on one end and a diesel engine on the other. Indeed, when they venture out onto the mainline, these days you will very rarely see a formation like that without the diesel on the back.

>>14137

They're on the same line you numbfuck. They both have the same trains.