Has anybody bought train tickets on-line
 

for someone else ?

Wanted to buy a ticket for somone to travel tomorrow morning ( they are in London, im in brighton )

But apparently its no bloody use cos they have to have my card in the hand to swipe thro teh machine ( train leaves at 6am)

What the feckin hell use is that...! :cuckoo:

last time i was in that situation i just got on the train and told the conductor i had lost my wallet, just give him my name and address and got a bill in the post a few weeks later.

bought mine from trainline, not sure what the score is with a last minute travel though

I imagine it's something to do with credit card fraud prevention.

Well its system thats more than possibly just altered my life plans :mad:


- my choice is to drive up to hand him the cash at 4 in the morning , if my car were here (which it aint) , after a very heavy night last night

Yes but gave up - its like Alice in Wonderland. Outward journey there were cheap tickets apparently available but no seats! Coming home it was the other way round. Completely crazy.

Thank goodness for cars!

I used to have this done for me every week, dead easy, you never used to have to have the card in your hand to swipe through the machine

You just had to use any credit / debit card to swipe through to collect your tickets from the machine on the station

Not sure if this is too late for you but you can do something called a silk (sp?) payment

your friend goes to railway station ticket office he/she is travelling from. You go to your local station ticket office. You can then pay the fare at your local station and they will call the office where your friend is and authorise them to print and hand over tickets to your friend.

Deffo to late now, but when I booked tickets last year for myself to go down to Manchester I booked the tickets online and paid for them, then there was the option of having them posted out or to be collected from the station, no mention of needing a card to swipe as they had already been paid for :wonder:

I too endured the hassle of trying to book tickets. The only post option I was given was the one where you pay a £5 premium (the tickets themselves were only £10). So I thought, yup I will collect at the station.

Great. I go to the station where I am starting my journey and find that its a small platform out in the back of beyond. No staff, and no ticket machine. In order to collect my tickets I need to be at my DESTINATION to get them. Of course you have to have your tickets BEFORE you get on the damn train :mad:

Total farce :(

thanks for your time folks :thumb:

thank christ he used his own money - and ive credited his account.

and he made the journey

Surely it would be technically possible to purchase on line ,get a reference no. ,text this to friend and he feeds number to machine and ticket is then printed :confused:

its what they do on coaches afterall

Why not call trainline and book the tickets over the phone explaining that you are doing it for someone else?

Again those fast ticket machines are great if you have prebooked but have your card :) I have used them alot in the last 2 weeks going up and down the west coast line.

The tickets can only be printed once, the reference number works nationally, so any ticket office/self service ticket machine can be used to collect tickets. How do you ensure the rightful person collects the tickets? If you start letting people collect tickets without the credit/debit card then it opens the system up to abuse. I can text my mate with a reference number, let him collect tickets and then go to an office myself with same reference number and insist the tickets should be mine with the aim of getting two tickets for the price of one!
It will then lead people to moan about how when they went to the ticket office with reference number, they were told by some jobsworth that the tickets had already been collected, and they were fed some bullsh*t story about how the tickets cannot be printed again. No doubt people would then suggest a system whereby you should have to produce the purchasing credit/debit card to prove the tickets should be yours before they can be collected.

Also all the ticket machine I have used recently I have only put in my CC and not entered the ref number and I still get the tickets, which makes sense.