Sorry but ticket offices are past their sell by date.
I tend to agree. I’ve used a ticket office twice in the last 20 years. First time they tried to charge me a penalty fare because the machine at the starting station was broken; the second time they sold me the most expensive ticket possible. Even the guard on the train told me that the same journey could be completed at less than half the price.
Ticket machines are deliberately confusing, in my opinion, to generate maximum revenue. That’s an easy fix.
Don’t know enough about train staff / drivers etc to comment.
That’s not an issue, it’s complete cobblers.
Pay rises don’t disadvantage the lower paid.
Just back to this @politecameraaction - missed your answer and you missed one very important character. I said % pay rises, the point being it's absolute £'s that matter, not what % people get.
As for the ticket offices. Ticket machines are in general great in my opinion, as long as you are reasonably e-literate and know what you want. As soon as you depart from that (and not meant to be a criticism about e-literacy, particularly among the more elderly) then they can be difficult. So now couple forcing those that will find it harder, trying to work out what they want and then having to cancel back out and start over, etc..... and suddenly ticket machines don't work very well for those behind no matter how easily they can use them.
It's not just a 'ticket office', it's manned stations, which mean you have access to information, support, safety, etc, as for online ticket sales, last two times i've done London trips i've saved by going to a ticket office and asking in person a couple of weeks beforehand.
The sad fact is we're losing our rail infrastructure a little at a time, all at the same time as we're throwing tens of billions at HS2, a vanity project that could have paid to update the entire network to reduce delays from the decaying system that's currently in place.
🤣
