I blogged a couple of years ago about the uselessness of signs telling people not to run in the train station. My point: people don’t run in the station because they think it’s fun, or because they’re unaware of the dangers; they run in the station because the passenger experience encourages people to run, and posters saying the opposite will do very little to change that.
Typical: of course the ticket machine chooses a busy time to go wrong. In Oxford station, queues were forming at a machine that refused to display Network Railcard as a valid railcard. The woman at the front of the queue tried for quite some time to make it work, then gave up and sought assistance. I was eavesdropping on her conversation with James, a busy member of station staff, when I got to the front of my own queue and encountered an identical problem. Soon it became clear that all the ticket machines had the same issue: refusing to display Network Railcard as an option.
Today's tale is my experience of buying train tickets from the First Great Western website. I was trying to buy a ticket from Oxford to London, returning on the following day.
I wanted to see all the return tickets available
What I did: chose “return” and typed in the dates of travel.
What I got: lots of different single ticket types, then one choice of return ticket (an off-peak return).