Time to end ticket check frustration

It normally comes as a shock to the system for rail commuters returning to work after the festive break in January.

However, this year it’s this week that Scotrail passengers will have felt the annual fares hike, and a bigger one than usual as tickets went up by 8.7 per cent on Monday.

That’s an extra £1.50 on my £17.70 return fare from the west end of Glasgow to Edinburgh – and colleagues in the office commented on the increases they had paid to travel into the capital from other parts of Scotland.

The rise reflects higher inflation levels, and travellers at peak times are spared having to pay up to double until at least the end of June while those higher fares remain suspended as part of a trial.

Paying to use Scotrail’s trains is also likely to become even easier, with an innovative phone app that will enable passengers to travel without even having to “buy” a ticket as such.

As you may have noticed from the increasingly frequent bleeps of tickets being checked on passengers’ phones by conductors and ticket examiners making their way through the carriages, more and more people are abandoning traditional paper tickets for electronic versions anyway.

But the new app will take things one stage further by only requiring travellers to enter their destination, which will be automatically verified when their arrive and the cheapest fare debited from their account.

I hope this will be an improvement, because I’ve used Scotrail’s current app and, as an irregular train traveller, still find it takes longer to buy a ticket than from a station ticket machine.

I’ve timed it, and it takes 12 seconds to press the buttons and for my tickets to be printed.

I won’t be the only one who finds this method quicker and easier. But to my repeated frustration, whenever there are ticket checks at the entrance to my local station, passengers are barked at accusingly: “Have you got a ticket?” before they’ve had a chance to buy one, the way I prefer to.

Scotrail chiefs like to refer to passengers as their “customers”. They need to remind their staff of that too.