Jumping the Queue

Online ticket sales and pre-paid ticket collection were causing significant backups at ticket machines at Southern railroad stations. This article discusses the new technology that has been introduced to reduce this congestion. After identifying purchasing trends and trends in passenger behavior, Southern and its ticket vendor machine (TVM) provider designed a unique ticket machine that is reducing transaction times, increasing ticket-on-departure (TOD) collections and enhancing the passenger experience. In the last year, more than 2 million tickets were purchased through Southern’s website, and 85.4% of these were picked up by customers using the TOD system at Southern stations. TVMs are expensive multifunction machines that take up a large amount of space. Since many of the queues come from people simply wishing to collect, not purchase tickets, what was needed were machines that met the increased demand for ticket collection. A new, smaller low-cost ticket machine was designed that specifically facilitated the collection of pre-paid tickets. Southern’s advanced new machines have dramatically reduced the length of time it takes to complete a transaction. The new pre-pay ticket machine design has a ticket escrow device that holds the tickets and delivers them to the customer all at the same time. This eliminates the common problem of a customer leaving before all of their tickets have been printed. The machine also holds more ticket stock, so that it can operate longer without human intervention. The first two TOD-only machines were installed in October 2010 and are already handling 80% of the total TOD transactions made at the station.