Great Western Coffee Shop

It happened to me yesterday, and I’m blaming my deteriorating eyesight for it!

I turned up at Chippenham with what I thought was the return portion of an off peak period return to Cam & Dursley. When the gateline rejected it and I went to the Help Point, it was pointed out that I had the outward leg ticket in my hand (the gateline was out of use when I arrived with the ticket, hence me still having it).

It was clear to me that I had taken the return portion out of my wallet in error, and I had left it at home…

I went to the booking office confidently expecting to have to buy a single to Cam & Dursley and to have to argue the toss later about a refund. Instead I was issued with a Supplementary Travel Authority to cover the journey, something I never knew existed but clearly much better for me in the circumstances.

So, in essence this is a “public thank you” to GWR for helping out an idiot in Chippenham station yesterday :)

The team at Chippenham are excellent.

And you only have to stand on the bridge doing a survey there for a couple of hours and watch people struggling with the gates and electronic call system when they don't function to realise just how many people try to use the wrong half!

The ability for passengers to cock things up is an interesting subject in itself... ;)

And the trouble is we all get tarred by the same brush! When I had my all-line rail rover last year the ticket would not operate the gatelines, and in most cases staff on the gate were aware of this. There were a few, however, who thought I was being a nit and insisted that I put the thing through the gateline, only to have it rejected. I have to admit that I did say to one of them whose demeanour suggested that I was the idiot here "There we are, now I've humoured you could you let m in please?"

There are many tales I could tell from when I was ASM's clerk at BTM back in the late 1970s, but this is probably not the thread to do it on, but two spring immediately to mind:

The tearful young woman who came in with a Birmingham to Bicester ticket (who was probably misunderstood by the person at Brum who she asked which was the train to Bicester);

Four blokes on a Saturday morning at 0445 in the days when overnight trains still ran from the north to the West Country, clutching Stockport to Euston tickets...

But back to my example on Tuesday, the guy on the gateline who actually let me through the gate with my Supplementary Authority to Travel appeared not to know where Cam & Dursley was... Such a lack of knowlwledge of railway geography didn't happen in my days in service!

Quite possibly related to the tearful young lady I once witnessed being lent the guard's mobile phone on a Virgin West Coast Pendolino, back in the days when Virgin also had Cross Country. New Street had been having one of its "this is a platform alteration" days, and the Euston train ended up on the platform the Southampton one was previously meant to be on. So this lady with her ticket to Leamington Spa ended up on the right coloured train, which then stopped at International and Coventry as expected. Unfortunately, she then discovered that the next stop was Watford Junction.