Great Western Coffee Shop

Outside our area - but an interesting issue with ticketing.


from Tony Hetherington in the Daily Mail (https://www.dailymail.co.uk/money/experts/article-9106499/TONY-HETHERINGTON-Im-going-rails-trying-pay-7-fare.html) - illustrated with a picture of Burscough Junction - read main article to find out why.

I would avoid Trainline altogether - not just for Merseyrail tickets!

Sounds like a few heads from Merseyrail and Trainline need banging together, surely it can't be that difficult to resolve these anomolies?

Indeed - especially as it seems was part of a (well?) known issue:
But written that way, it does give the impression of Merserrail staff pushing the blame to Trainline rather than taking a collective "we need to sort this for the customer" attitude.  The payment request for GBP-125 was from Merseyrail, after all ...

Exactly - good edit.

More concerned with transferring blame than putting the customer first - exactly the type of culture which needs to change.

Putting a slightly different slant on this, having had to deal with similar complaints myself:

Someone (SH) ordered a ticket using Trainline, for collection at a later time, and went to a Merseyrail station despite having been told that the ticket could not be collected from that station (their ticket machines are fairly basic being aimed at local journeys and aren't connected to the system that allows remote ordering and collection).  SH then travelled clutching a computer print-out giving details of the order (it probably said on it "NOT VALID FOR TRAVEL" and had details of how to collect the ticket) and was surprised to get a Penalty fare.

Trainline will happily sell the ticket.  They get the commission, and the buyer might want to collect the ticket elsewhere for some reason having been given a list of stations from which it could be picked up. SH certainly wasn't expected to buy another ticket specifically to travel to Burscough Junction purely to buy the ticket (that's the Daily Mail doing what the Daily Mail does best!), but might of course have been going there anyway for some other reason.

Merseyrail staff have no way of knowing if the person waving the printout has already collected the actual ticket and used it, would have little sympathy knowing that Trainline tells buyers where tickets can be collected and would have been bemused/suspicious about someone going online for a ticket they could have bought on the day at the same price from the ticket machine they claimed to want to collect the pre-ordered ticket from.

The subsequent confusion about the Penalty Fare being cancelled was unfortunate, but given SH's approach I wouldn't be surprised if any lack of clarity was on both sides or things weren't quite as described.

If MerseyRail is part of the National Rail network, why are their machines allowed to be incompatible with the TOD that all/most other operators use?

It's not just Trainline. I've just tried to see if I would be offered a ticket for the same route on the GWR app. It will sell it to me but like Trainline, doesn't offer Ormskirk as somewhere I could collect from. It also doesn't offer a mobile ticket either.

I can only go back to one of my favourite posts on the forum

Yes. I know the message about the trainline comes too late for some, but my message has been consistent. Avoid.

And still MerseyRail are fining people who have bought tickets ...

From the Liverpool ECHO (https://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/news/liverpool-news/man-confused-hes-fined-120-23146133)

He didn't go to court, which is understandable, but I suspect that the first one that does might win their case and have the whole lot changed. We have lawyers on the group - what do they think?

I am thinking here of 'balance/fairness' in contract law, or the test of mens rea in criminal law. Plus, in the original example, before Trainline refunded his ticket, Merseyrail had been paid for the journey. It was merely an absence of unrefundable proof (in the shape of an issued ticket), that Merseyrail itself refused to enable with its out of date machines.