West Somerset Railway General Discussion

Presumably though if the ticket printing machine is nearly life expired & you cant get the blanks you are going to have to spend some money somewhere & could find yourself in a situation where it goes wrong if you are not careful

 

On normal running days the WSR system does not sell allocated seats, just tickets, so the ticket is valid for any train on that day.

 

Festiniog?

 

One of the early iterations of the Ffestiniog TITAN system developed by Brian Bushell on an old Apricot if I recall correctly.

John

 

Perhaps the narrow gauge is ahead on this. I've had attractive computer printed tickets on the Festiniog, Welsh Highland, Talyllyn and Puffing Billy Railways

 

The Ffestiniog. They later marketed the system to the Brecon Mountain Railway and the Romney, Hythe & Dymchurch.

I think they're still using a system based on it, although it has been redeveloped to some extent due to changes in easily-available computer and printer hardware over the years.

Edit: oops, didn't realise other people had already replied!

 

On the QB breakfast train a couple of years ago, I presented my Edmondson while everyone else was waving their phones & grocery-store receipts around.
"Oh good", said the TTI, "a real ticket".

Perhaps the date stamp machines could become an interactive exhibit for kids of all ages - their very own souvenir ticket.

 

Every steam locomotive on the line was in a lot worse condition than "life-expired" in the not-too recent past, yet here they are now, almost as good as new.

 

I think it would be more accurate to say "the vast majority of passengers don't appear to care what ticket they get". As a frustrated restauranteur of foreign extraction pointed out, "the British are the worst customers in the world. If something is wrong, they almost never complain, they smile, leave and never come back".

 

How about saying that Robin had to enter signalboxes by unlocking the door on seven occasions on that shift? Less or more confusing?

 

I must say that I found the 'if she wanted to be a truthful and honest person' jibe a bit extreme.

Robin

 

It's the little things that are disappearing almost unnoticed and unmourned even on heritage railways.
I remember as a youngster the KER-CHUNK, KER-CHUNK as my ticket was stamped and issued to me.
Tony Hancock described the movement of a train as Clickety Clack, Clickety Clack, Biddly Bong, Biddly Bong
The open air Gents at Dunster station (yes I've been told off before for wanting that)
The telegraph poles with the wires that sagged in summer and went tight in the winter

These are memories that travellers on our 'heritage railway' will never have.

 

I don't understand the 'waffle' on here.

As per sections of the Bluebell, which have been relaid in the last few years, the WSR has track/permanent way which is getting life expired.

It needs replacing at considerable expense.

I would have expected the sort of concerted appeal that happened with the SVR and GWSR with flood and embankment damage, in each case very successful.

Obviously, a report on the state of the track is being carried out, and the report is awaited, and hopefully will spearhead a much more vigorous fundraising campaign than has hitherto resulted, with a very poor response to date.

Cheers,
Julian

 

That's a tricky one because - speaking personally - I also lock the door if I have to leave the box for, say, a trip to the loo. So the number of times you've unlocked the door doesn't necessarily correspond to anything relevant

(Not to comment on my own or people's toilet habits, but that's just an example of another reason you might lock the door!)

 

I do quite miss the KER-CHUNK as my ticket is issued to me, but while an Edmondson ticket is nice to have I'm not really bothered by not getting one.
The "clickety click" is something I can happily live without if it's not there.
I believe Washford still has an open air gents if you want to experience the, er, delights of being rained on while you use the facility.
Telegraph poles and their wires are something I really DON'T miss, watching the posts swish past and those dratted wires going up and down used to drive me crazy!

 

True, but I expect that the expertise and parts supply (and also the supply chain for the latter) are entirely different for ticket machines, and developing those is probably non-trivial. There would also be an 'opportunity cost', in that a volunteer (or paid staffer) then wouldn't be available for something else (e.g. signaling equipment repair, to pick something with a likely similar skill-set). It might make sense to centralize such work, but then for a line to avail itself of that would be an external expense, so one would have to balance the historical ambience positive to the expense/etc negative - much like the adoption of CWR. I can see the answer being different in this case, but it's probably purely a hypothetical at the moment, since I don't know if anyone's set up to restore old ticket machines.

Noel

 

Looking to the future where will you source new card tickets from when the current stock is exhausted?

 

There are other railways that have Edmondson machines and I haven’t heard that blank tickets are in short supply? In any case - of all the remarkable things that heritage railways have been able to produce, are small bits of card really the most difficult to procure?

Tom

 

Just got clarity, because the two often seem to get elided in this thread: flat bottom rail is not synonymous with continuously welded rail. You can have flat bottom in traditional panelled construction. If you do - and considering just the customer experience, not the cost and logistics for the p/way teams - then you lose a bit of appearance for anyone standing lineside but retain the “clicketty clack” sound for passengers in the train. Which I suspect is why increasingly a “flat bottom outside station areas” is seen as an acceptable compromise that reduces cost but doesn’t massively change the experience for paying passengers. Going to continuously welded rail is another step altogether.

In heritage terms, and the tension between cost effectiveness and historic authenticity(*), there are battles to be fought but also probably some not worth fighting: I’d put use of FB rail outside station areas into the latter category.

(*) I’m talking in general here, not WSR specific.

Tom

 

In the early days of the EOR I was often guard/TTI and clipping tickets was all part of the show (although there were a few occassions when I encountered people who 'didn't realise we had to pay'). It was a good way to start a conversation and tell people a little about the railway. Many were surprised at how old the DMU was and knowing a little about it, were then more appreciative of the fact it was still running (I didn't point out that I was constantly surprised too. ).
There an occasion when a one young man in a powered wheelchair and his rather elderly father (who were regulars so I knew them) couldn't remember which pocket Dad had put the tickets in. He thought it really funny when I pointed out he'd better find them as it was a long walk back from North Weald, knowing that he had a nice comfortable chair to ride in while Dad walked.
(And before anyone has a go about this attitude, it was just banter and both they and I knew they had paid).