Edmonson tickets a lost "cause" for ever?

Not quite. What I'm saying is that the forthright opinions expressed so strongly here are out-of-touch with what the majority of the travelling public think. Whilst some of the older generations may try to encourage some enthusiasm in their grandchildren for Edmondson tickets, I am equally certain that the young families who represent a big chunk of railways' income care far more about being able to book their tickets online, and if the railway is main line-connected, being able to buy a through ticket from their local station (e.g. an East Croydon-Sheffield Park & return).

Not welcomed by whom? The visitors, or railway volunteers who don't want to hear what the public think of how they run their line? I rather suspect the latter, given the generally unsatisfactory experiences I have had in recent years! Tickets aren't part of the experience - the experience is about restored stations, vintage carriages (be they 1860s or 1960s) and steam haulage. As I said, most young families will care far more about stuff like online pre-booking and through ticketing than Edmondsons! Most kids will have ridden on many trains, certainly more so than those of 30 years ago...

...and no, there is NO charm or plus-point to diesel haulage of any description! I've abandoned railway visits (sometimes beforehand, sometimes on arrival!) and taken my money elsewhere whenever I've found diesel haulage on instead of steam... I have always maintained, and continue to maintain, that all diesels are inherently devoid of heritage value and should be kept as far from preservation as possible. A shunter or two may be a necessity, but the likes of 33s, 37s, 40s, 45s, 47s, 50s etc are overkill for those kind of jobs, and are not welcomed on passenger trains by the general public. Alas, the one former diesel-free preserve managed to get round the ban via an emergency motive power shortage, and once the exemption for shunting was in place, next thing they were having full-blown diesel galas. I've spoken to quite a few long-time BRPS members who cancelled their subscriptions over that.

 

Impressed that you are so convinced that you do understand what the travelling public want.

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Old School Bluebell attitude.

 

So we, many volunteers who all have regular contact with our travelling public in our public facing roles are out of touch, and you are?...

 

This is debatable. To anybody aged under 50, steam is as remote as the horse bus is to older people. Diesel traction, in an age of emus and dmus can be as much heritage as steam. Certainly a first gen emu/dmu or Mk1 is as much heritage as 4-wheeler compartment stock (as if you could ride in these anyway). If an Edmondson is irelevant because most people don't have any memories of them, then so, I posit, is steam. Of course, that's not a reason to pooh-pooh steam and neither is it a reason to pooh-pooh heritage tickets such as Edmonsons (or even NCR21s, Multisets or Ultimatics although the hardware and paper supplies for these are now virtually unobtainable, unlike Edmondson stock).

LP Hartley, author of The Go-Between wrote,

"The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there".

Heritage railways are pure theatre, a form of re-enactment and, even if the average punter doesn't know what to expect, it is our task to recreate a lost way of life and put it in front of them, be it a steam engine, railbus, flag-waving guard or an Edmondson issued from a proper booking office. It's not hard to do it properly!

 

My apologies that I had to complete by earlier post rather rapidly for the vital reason that dinner was ready!

I suspect quite a few of us are possibly continuing an argument where we know we aren't going to change minds, and some maybe just to 'wind-up' others.

My position is simple:

1. Edmondson tickets won't 'make or break' a visit for 'most people' but are a part of the overall heritage experience for a great many, quite a few of whom would not realise this if they had never experienced them but appreciate them as 'something different' when they do get them.
2. For some, perhaps not many, it will be as vital as 'no diesel' clearly is to @BrightonBaltic - many passengers will put up with a diesel, so perhaps he/she should be understanding of those for whom the 'deal breaker' is something else (even if diesel being a deal breaker may be more widespread).
3. Edmondson systems are usually already there, cheap to set up, provide good basic data for easy to maintain, adapt and interpret 'back office' systems and have low running costs while providing basic takings data. Their 'shortcomings' - sales per train - are not actually relevant in many cases and only passenger counts will do unless railways move to an 'all pre-booked' model.
4. EPOS is expensive for hardware. Much software (of any type, not just EPOS) is effectively leased with a combined supply and support fee. These won't go down and tend to go up well ahead of general inflation! Bespoke changes are expensive and often ineffective (@35B speaks with real experience here, and my experience confirms what he says) and getting the data you actually want from reports could easily involve 'seeing the wood for the trees' type issues, clouding rather than easing decision making. Issuing can be slow compared with Edmondson, especially for an experienced Edmondson operator.

In summary, Edmiondson seems to give a customer benefit for lines trying to convey a heritage experience, systems are existing, staff are familiar with it and it is pretty cheap to set up and run. EPOS is, by the EPOS website's own admission, expensive to set up, comparatively expensive to run, require training to operate and tend to be slower (for all uses).

BTW, stand alone Gift Aid systems are available and can be used alongside Edmondson just as easily as specialist (i.e. more expensive) EPOS (for most EPOS users, they are irrelevant).

So, I return to the challenge - show me how the 'improved' management information from EPOS justifies the 'large capital investment' to install them in the first place.

Steven

 

I want to see the old red and white 1970s BR tickets...

 

IIRC this was a NCR type, mainly at Inter-City stations.

There used to be an excellent online resource, Ticket Machine Website which detailed stuff like this. Sadly it vanished from the net a year or two ago

 

Gosh!

There’s so much wrong with this, where do you start?

In no particular order;

(1) EPOS ‘tickets’ Certainly aren’t part of the experience!

(2) a number of youngsters ARE enthusiastic about heritage diesels.

(3) I, and a number of other folk are nostalgic about 33’s 50’s etc, which we rode behind, worked with...

(4) Bluebell folk who cancelled their membership because of the occasional diesel and diesel Gala, are, IMHO, just daft / cutting off their noses to spite their faces.

P.S. When I was a Bluebell signalman (before the travesty of modernity that is Horsted Box was installed in place of the delightful heritage installation it used to have because the Signal engineer ignored what everyone else wanted and was allowed to get away with that by the Trustees) I used to travel from Somerset to work Horsted for the Steam Monday shunt...

Robin

 

And, of course, epos systems can be hacked, corrupted or crash at a critical moment. That could happen when the station is closed/deserted or when the station is rammed with customers wanting tickets - Guess which scenario it'll be!

Don't recall the last time an Edmondson system crashed

 

Robin White makes some good points here,

In no particular order;

(1) EPOS ‘tickets’ Certainly aren’t part of the experience!

(2) a number of youngsters ARE enthusiastic about heritage diesels.

(3) I, and a number of other folk are nostalgic about 33’s 50’s etc, which we rode behind, worked with...

(4) Bluebell folk who cancelled their membership because of the occasional diesel and diesel Gala, are, IMHO, just daft / cutting off their noses to spite their faces.

Anecdotally, I notice that small children are often most interested in "the diesel" and shun the steam. But, crucially, an interest may begin with diesels and mature to steam at a later time. We all are nostalgic for what we grew up with. That may be (for an ever dim inishing number of people) steam, or it may be diesel/elec, which, remember date back to pre-WW2. Even Inter-City (a very successful brand by state-owned BR) is now potentially a heritage area. For me, a 47 heading 12 Mk1's is as inspiring as, eg an express steamer.

Epos, whatever its merits, is not part of a heritage experience. But it may, for example, feature in a heritage "privatised railway" scenario in a century's time maybe!

 

I seem to remember in the 1980s the guard on the train on various lines issuing tickets from the same type of machine that bus conductors and drivers used at the time, it always seemed to be a bit of paper and some faint ink markings that were completely impossible to decipher other than you could maybe recognise the date

 

This would be an Almex A machine that BR used as a replacement for early Setright machines on Paytrains. BR used pink roll, sometimes with text on the reverse IIRC, bus operators used yellow roll, sometimes with ads on reverse. Produced a small square "ticket". You are right that the purple (occasionally red) ink was often feint. Almex A's date back to the late '50s and were the standard machine on the Continent. Originally made in Sweden, a factory was later set up in Edenbridge to cater for UK market. All gone now. It produced a ticket that bordered on a receipt.

I recall seeing cases of rolls abandoned in the rain in an obscure area of my local station in the mid-80s when electronic machines took over. Wish I'd rescued a few as BR rolls are very rare now wheras the yellow are still around.

 

Utter nonsense. Online booking is fine for purchases which are limited by space or time, such as airline tickets or concert tickets. For something like a steam railway where (Santas excepted) you can turn up on the day and *guarantee* to get in, there is no benefit whatsoever and, given what a faff it is to herd small children out of the house to any sort of timescale, having pre-booked tickets would just be an additional source of unnecessary stress.

As for through ticketing, whilst I can see the advantage in arriving at my local station and punching “Bluebell Railway” into the machine, increasingly people are now aware that they will probably save money by buying separate tickets - not necessarily on the steam railway element, but on some of the TOCs you need to travel with to get there. So I suspect a lot of people don’t bother with it even if they could.

And anyway, I don’t see why the two systems can’t work side-by-side with electronic/through ticketing for visitors buying in advance and Edmondson for those buying at stations. These are surely accounted for separately anyway so who cares if they issue tickets a different size & shape?

Really? I took my 4 year old to the Epping-Ongar Railway last weekend where I am pleased to report that not only was the clippie on the connecting vintage bus able to issue full line tickets but they were proper Edmondsons. (He was cash only mind - but was happy for us to pay at the station had that caused us a problem.)
The ticket was checked & clipped during our visit and my son immediately piped up “why do you make a hole in it?” which led to a whole discussion about ticketing, so yes it was very much part of the experience for him. Now, I’m not saying he preferred it to the vintage bus or the steam engine or the ice cream, but he certainly noticed it.

What a silly post. Diesel locomotives have been around for 80+ years and 60 year old ones are common, whereas some steam locos were in museums at the age of 20. You don’t have to like them but claiming they have no heritage value is just daft. On the GCR we have two diesels which were built in Loughborough, another which worked in the town for many years, and another which was based at a GC shed in Nottinghamshire, so these four at least have more relevance locally than some of the steam engines do. I’m not saying they’re more important than the Robinson O4 but come on - no heritage value?


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You are rather missing the point about online bookings - most 'ordinary' folk expect it to be available these days, just like they expect businesses to take cards instead of cash (note this story about cash transactions being shunned https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-44496513).

It also means they can skip the queues which form at the booking office on busy days (note sometimes a shortage of volunteers prevents all available ticket windows being able to be opened).

Society is changing - it wants more flexibility in life, be it the ability to order your groceries from your phone then simply pick them up from a collection point on the way home from work, buy tickets electronically and simply show a barcode to the staff on entry, etc.

The other point about online booking is that if a group books a ticket for a couple of days time and the weather turns out to not be as good as expected, they are still likely to turn up (usually refunds are not permitted with pre booked tickets) so the railway gets a guaranteed income. If they have to wait until they get to the railway to buy and they look out the window and see its raining, they are much less inclined to venture out. For example I went to Beaulieu Motor Museum recently and saved £5 on the standard adult admission by purchasing my ticket online the day before. Both sides gained from this arrangement, I paid less but Beaulieu got a guaranteed lump of cash and did not have to rely on the weather.

 

Too many points to address here, most of which are going round in circles.

I will, however, make two of my own:
1) heritage value and calendar age are not necessarily related. A 20-year-old BR Standard in the early days of preservation had more heritage value than a diesel of that era has now, simply because steam has character, charm and soul, whereas diesels are the definition of soulless - all look and sound the same, make the same dreary racket and usually pour out as much clag as a poorly-fired steamer.
2) it is NOT the case that we are all nostalgic for what we grew up with. I've spent most of my life with Class 455s as the mainstay of my local service here, and I would happily destroy every last one, just to ensure nobody ever got a chance to implement the idiotic idea of preserving one. My dad, meanwhile, grew up with (mostly) Class 40s and bubblecar DMUs on the ECML east of Dundee - and to this day has an abiding hatred of them both, especially as they displaced the V2s and A2s that had been the mainstay of the route in his early childhood.

 

You confuse heritage value with taste. The survival and restoration to running order of the CoBo, for example, is of far greater heritage value than another BR standard. That you’d prefer not to see or hear it is something else. Similarly, the loss of all BR Mk3 derived units would leave us without any living record of a massive part of how people commuted. They form part of a tradition that the 100 seaters also belong to.

Should you preserve a railway, you will be entitled to run it as you will. But on the evidence of this thread, it will have similar heritage value to an electronic church organ - makes all the right noises, but is at heart something completely different.


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I don't really subscribe to diesels having more or even equal heritage importance as steam. The lines would not be there but for steam, but as an added attraction, they are of interest and of course they are very useful. They add a little to the experience, in my view a heritage ticket adds as much or more. The same can be said for milk churns and luggage on the station, The Guard (himself a relic) waving a green flag, goods trains on special occasions , highly polished signalboxes and so many more elements which all go to make up the Yesteryear Experience. Yes, Steam makes up the biggest and most important part, but it would be a poorer place without all the other elements. So, please railway managements, dump your electronic systems, they are out of place.
I take the point about online bookings, nowadays people will expect that, but I would prefer that standard tickets are collected on arrival.

 

interesting case in point: I just saw a "Quick Quid" ad on the TV, which is clearly shot at a preserved line , using Mk1s is the give away, but pretending to be a mainstream commuter train.

How did they disguise that it was a preserved line? the station foreman gave the right away with a bat.

 

Heritage involves many eras. By your logic, we should ditch steam as wagonways used horses, so no steam required.

None of which alters the reality that, on average, steam attracts more interest than diesel.


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