Train ticket grief

Edmondson ticket on the North Western Railway

It seem to be more difficult than ever to make casual journeys. On Sunday evening, around 7pm, I tried, and failed to buy two tickets from Stockholm C to Uppsala C, using the SJ app, being on our way to the station in someone’s car. First, the app asked what train I wanted to travel on. Obviously, I wanted to go on the first train to depart, but we did not know when we would get to the station. Next, it asked for the name of the person I would be travelling with. Then it tried to reserve seats. Since there were three of us travelling and we wanted to sit together, we absolutely did not want reserved seats but to find the seats for ourselves once we were on the train.

Then I realised that the credit card I had with me is registered to another mobile telephone than the one I had with me, so would not have been able to pay for it. When I got home I tried to register my card to the SJ app but there no means of doing so. 

At the station, I was unable to use the machine, which came as a shock, as I am used to British ticket machines, of which there are a dozen different types, from bad to terrible. To come up with one which is even worse is an achievement. Fortunately, my friend was with me and able to help, but we still had the business with filling in names and choosing our train, all while there was a train standing in the platform, waiting to depart late, which we wanted to catch. 

Then we ended up with reserved seats which we did not sit in, as the compartment in the buffet car was available. That was the best part of the journey. 

With the advance of technology, it is getting more and more difficult to buy tickets. When I stayed in Uppsala between 2007 and 2010, there were ticket machines at the ends of the platform where you could quickly buy a ticket at any time using a credit or debit card, then just got on the first train that was going to Uppsala. You could also buy tickets from Pressbyrån, the newsagent.

This raises some general points. 

1.  The SJ app should include the facility of registering a credit card to it, which is possible with Västtraffik, SL and UL apps. 
2. There is no necessity to sell tickets to named individuals. Such a system was abolished in Britain in 1842. 
3. Paper tickets should be more substantial than flimsy thermal printed paper. They are too easily mislaid with till receipts and other scraps of paper that accumulate in people’s wallets. Physical tickets should be either the credit-card style like the British orange ones, or the Edmondson card type (illustrated example at top from the Fat Controller’s railway). These could include a QR code; Edmondson style 30 x 57 mm card or plastic tickets would be thick enough to incorporate quite a lot of electronics and are potentially programmable and re-usable. Both styles of ticket are big enough and solid enough not to get mislaid, so that train staff would not be wasting time while passengers were looking for their flimsy tickets. 
4. Fares need to be simplified, at least for the journeys most commonly made. Effective yield management could be achieved with a simple two-tier structure which should suffice to discourage passengers from travelling on the busiest trains and optimise revenue. 
5. Subject to the above, any ticket should be available on any train. When passengers are tied to a particular train, it results in hugely extended journey times as passengers have to allow such a lot of time in order to be certain that they will not miss the train they have bought their ticket for. It defeats the entire object of running trains at high speeds if you have to reckon to turn up at the station half an hour, or even an hour before departure time. 
6. Seat reservation is often more trouble than it is worth. Unless there is a plan of the seat layout, I have almost always found that I did not want to sit in the seat that I had been allocated, usually because the window seat was not really a window seat, or the seat was adjacent to the toilet, or it was not a seat with a fixed table. 
7. ‘Kan vara reserverad’ (could be reserved). That is a useless message which just adds to the stress of a journey, as you can sit in the seat and then discover, half-way through the journey, that the seat has become reserved.
8. It would be a huge benefit if electronic systems were scrapped and replaced by paper based systems so that passengers know what is reserved and the stations between which the reservation applies. 
9. In order to avoid overcrowding, but without seat reservation, British Railway once had a system where ‘train regulation tickets’ were required in order to travel on particular trains which were likely to be overcrowded. This system would also allow supplementary charges to be made for travel at the most popular times. 
10. The need to reserve seats is partly due to the seating layout of the vehicles. There are too many window seats which do not have windows, there are not enough seats in the facing bay layout which allows people to sit together and at the same time place their luggage between seat backs where they can keep an eye on it. When luggage has to be placed in luggage racks at the ends of the vehicles, it is not secure. There is little necessity for seat reservation with trains such as the X31 and Danish IC3 stock which have a good balance of airline-style and facing seats.