Wasteful ticket machine madness

In an age when everything seems to be done on a smartphone and revenue protection staff and guards on trains seem entirely focused on scanning ticket QR codes on phones there is still something reassuring about holding and presenting a paper rail ticket, even it is barely glanced at on most of the trains I travel on.

As someone who usually buys in advance and collects my pre-paid tickets from a station ticket vending machine (TVM), what I have recently noticed is the ludicrous way in which a relatively simple journey means you are presented not only with the ticket coupons you want and a collection receipt, but also a handful of totally useless “seat reservations”.

I am told that the ticket stock for these machines is not cheap to buy, so when I went to my local station to pick up the tickets for a day trip with friends from Haslemere to Lymington Pier I was truly shocked when along with the two coupons of my Anytime Day Return ticket (£26.15 with railcard) the machine spewed out a total of eight useless seat reservation coupons.

Admittedly this 63¼-mile two-and-a-half hour journey does involve changes of train at Havant, Southampton Central and Brockenhurst, but seats cannot be reserved on any of these trains and an Anytime Day Return means just that – from the first available railcard departure (08.57 from Haslemere) it is valid on any one of the half-hourly connections to Lymington for the rest of the day.

But making an online booking requires you to input travel times, even if your planned travel time is highly tentative, so along with the tickets you need comes a heap of utterly useless reservation coupons that clearly state “No specific seat(s) reserved” and which no revenue protection staff will ever have the slightest interest in checking.

This never used to be an issue, when buying a day return or other open ticket simply gave you what you had asked for, but some genius in Network Rail IT, or whoever is responsible for programming station TVMs, seems to have decided to create a whole lot of unnecessary waste by deciding that whatever ticket you buy requires you to also receive a “seat reservation”.

That may be a marginal issue when you are making a single point-to-point journey, but take a journey like mine, that involves four different trains and three changes along the way, and you will be presented with a pile of useless cardboard to discard or re-cycle – I believe that the magnetic strip in paper tickets means they are not easily recycled.

Talk of reforming our outdated rail ticketing systems seems to have gone on forever, and issues like split-ticketing seem to be ducked and exploited nowadays on a grand scale, but in all this chat no-one seems to have cottoned on to the ridiculous waste caused by the issue of pointless reservation coupons for journeys where seats can never actually be reserved. It is high time that something was done to stop this waste.