LO Ticket Office closures

Quite, and account for a substantial proportion of first class usage. When Mr Corbyn nationalises the railways will first class be for the chop? I ask because when I was a boy my dad usually made a beeline for the declassified firsts in the Quint-arts (declassified 1941 but still comfortable in the 5os!)

The Chiltern "Business Zone" is not first class. Even if you hold a 1st class ticket you have to pay the supplement if you wish to use the facilities.

That division was much more to do with "sectorisation", which allocated all services on the former Southern Region to the "Network South East" operating division, (except Gatwick Express and the Cross Country services from the South Coast to Birmingham and beyond, which were deemed "Inter City" - the fomer because it was supposed to be profit-making, and the latter because it didn't fit anywhere else - although in reality it was no more (and no less) of an inter city service than the "Regional" sector's transpennine services).



Not overall, maybe. But the areas of East Kent served by the Javelins are less well-off than the areas of Warwickshire (Solihull, Warwick) served by Chiltern

www.kentlive.news/news/kent-news/21-most-deprived-areas-kent-497851

One of the "reasons" cited is the ability to make staff more visible to "customers", rather than having them hidden away in a ticket office. If you need help with ticketing, or have some complicated problem with trains that you don't know the answer to yourself, is the ability to call staff to the ticketing area available on Overground stations? Is there an intercom button that connects you to their walkietalkie, or alerts them that they are needed in one particular place?

What LR Towers is probably trying to say, in not so many words, is that "We can't guarantee there'll be anyone around, so we won't put them in the most obvious place". Finchley Road & Frognal, on the closure list, has the best possible ticket/control office with wide glass window, easily visible to all passing, so the argument really doesn't stand up.
When I've needed to find the Croxley "human", they're invariably in the old ticket office, which can only be seen into by craning across the barrier, then shouting to attract attention... Or the gates are locked open with nobody to be seen.

By all means evict them from the cosy Booking Office, but will they be on the platform...  No, they will gravitate to the equally cosy Porters Room / mess room, with the added bonus of there not being a Station Foreman around to evict them and put them to work.

In my limited experience it is one of two extremes on LU. As per your and others' observations that no one is around or, in Zone 1 locations, there are so many staff that they're having a nice chin wag. I'm not sure either extreme is acceptable - it certainly looks rubbish if you are a customer.

I actually used the rebuilt Hackney Wick stn this week. I counted 4 LO staff but I can't be certain they were all on duty or whether a shift change was about to happen as it was mid afternoon. There was certainly one in the ticket office, one "hovering" in the ticket hall and one on the w/b platform. That struck me as a little bit much given the station was not exactly overburdened with passengers. I accept it may be very different in the peaks but isn't that what part time / split shifts are designed to cover?

I also don't necessarily "get" this emphasis on visible staff. I'd rather that there was an obvious, well sign posted and consistent location in stations where you know you can find help or assistance if you require it. Quite why that can't be a multi functional space that also happens to sell a ticket I don't know. Having done some station information cover and stood in freezing cold ticket halls for hours on end I can readily sympathise with staff wishing to be in a room rather than standing in an icy blast. There is also, to my mind, another issue at some LO stations. Many are quite small and congested so where on earth will the staff stand without causing congestion at ticket gates or in front of machines or in corridors? Are they going to be forced to stand on platforms where there is often little appreciable cover / weather protection on many LO stations? Given all the money spent on genuine improvements at LO stations I'm not really convinced by a mass closure programme. I also think it may fall foul of Mr Grayling's clear desire not to help out a TfL controlled by a Labour mayor. I wonder how many closure requests may be refused just to heap a bit more financial pressure on TfL? Perverse I know but not the first such decision for this SoS in respect of TfL.

I am not sure that is a photo of the UTS standard ticket office at Ickenham. That looks very much pre-UTS to me. There were no wide windows on UTS until the Jubilee Line Extension. I won't bore people with details of the tortured debate that went on about those. The decision to have relatively narrow windows and no big expanses of glass were for security reasons and to ensure the windows and ticket bowls (the bit where you put your money and got your ticket from the clerk) were ballistic attack resistant. That Ickenham window office doesn't look hugely secure to me. Still it's all academic now but a lot of money has been spent on throwing away the past and more will be spent on LO too. Makes me wonder what the evaluation period was for ticket office suites in many station rebuild / refurb / development projects and whether that spend has ended up being wasted. That must certainly be an issue on LO where money has gone into a lot of building work on the former North London Railways stations and then those inherited with West Anglia.

E-mail from TfF:

You should make a formal complaint to TfL about this if it was how you describe.