Dom Davis (The Blog)

I’m sure I’ve whinged about this before, but I’m going to again. The ticket barriers in Norwich station are beginning to really piss me off. Not because they’re there (I spent over a decade commuting in London, you kind of get used to them), it’s just they are so slow.

Go to any central London station and you’ll either see the new issue slimline TFL gates or (assuming any are still kicking about) the old style tube ticket gates. Now, we’ll forget about Oyster, forget about other people, it’s just you and the TFL gate. Doesn’t matter which style, either way you can walk up to one of these, feed in your ticket, retrieve your ticket and walk through, all in one deft motion without breaking your stride.

The same action at Norwich involves you trying to feed your ticket in. Assuming you can. While it’s never happened to me, some people seem to be unable to feed their ticket in, and I don’t think it’s through blind stupidity as it happens far too often and isn’t something you see often in London. The next party trick is for the mechanism to pull in the ticket, then spit it out, the pull it in repeatedly while the hapless traveler tries to time the retrieval properly. It does stop after 5 or so goes but there isn’t the immediate (and admittedly ignored) beep, “Please seek assistance” you get from the TFL gates. Let’s say you’re lucky and your ticket goes through. It’s now a wait of at least a second, if not more before the gates slowly open. It’s enough to make you wonder if it’s even accepted your ticket. Anyway, eventually you walk through and, an eon or so later, the gates close behind you.

Stick that kind of gate into Bank station at morning rush hour and you’d have queues from the ticket hall all the way to the DLR (a sod of a long way). And that’s from people who understand the concept of a ticket barrier.

Now add in all the holiday makers and day trippers to whom a ticket barrier is a novelty. They stand in front of the barrier (an act that would get them trampled to death in London), fish out a ticket, attempt to feed it in, wait for it to open and head through. Even if the person behind has their ticket to hand they’ll invariably wait for the gates to shut before making their attempt. It just takes forever. It’s little wonder they throw open one if the disabled gates and just have someone take a cursory glance at people’s tickets as people stream through. Or they could have just invested in some proper barriers that work instead of these annoying, slow cheap ones they’ve got.

You know it’s going to be a fun journey when you get on the train and your olfactory senses are overwhelmed with The Lynx effect cranked up to the power of 11. That, or the thick fog of someone who’s obviously marinaded in Pretention For Men overnight. It’s kind of understandable if it’s some 14 year old kid trying to impress a girl but when it’s a middle aged bloke you can’t help but think that they should know of the miraculous properties of soap.

I guess I can take comfort in the fact that they didn’t deploy half a can of deodorant on themselves while actually on the train, gassing everyone close by. Something that seems to happen with alarming regularity in the office.

Since my records began (over 3 years ago) I have handed over somewhere in the region of £15,000 to the rail companies, mostly National Express East Anglia, formerly One. At the end of my London career I was handing over £361 per month for the privelidge of sitting on the floor in the foyer of London bound intercities and a further £40 a week to get to and from Cromer and my Tai Chi classes. Tot that lot up and it comes to over 6 grand a year. Even when I was working from home it was costing me £80+ every time I went to London (thankfully only a few times a month).

Between stopping work and now I must have spent £50 on the trains tops (which actually equates to quite a few trips as it’s only £6.20 return to Norwich off peak) which is a much better state of affairs. This changed yesterday when I handed over £1436 for an annual season ticket. It’s the cheapest season ticket I’ve had since I lived in Zone 2, something I was quite pleased about… which just goes to show how numb I’ve become the cost of rail travel.