TPE moves into electronic ticketing ….
Slowly Britain’s Railways are crawling into the electronic age.
First we had Wrexham & Shropshire with their tickets by text message, then Virgin had a trial of e-tickets from Manchester to London only, subsequently, I think, discontinued.
Now TransPennine Express (TPE) have started with print your own tickets.
Here’s an example from a few days ago.
It looks as though this version is likely to be around for some time. It appears to be delivered by The Trainline on behalf of TPE. Let’s hope this is the beginning of print your own tickets for all Britain’s railways; the Swiss have been doing it for a few years. The alternative of having to go to a station with a Fast Ticket Machine is a pain. There’s none on our line between Stockport and Chester.
Good to see TPE coping with Airport travellers’ concerns about their planes being late and missing the connection. They allow the ticket to be used on subsequent trains – have a look at the specific TPE travel conditions.
6 comments 
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March 21st, 2010 at 1:07 pm
If you book your advance purchase tickets via the Trainline (08457 222 333) your tickets are sent to you by first post for no extra charge.
March 22nd, 2010 at 6:57 am
Hi, Andrew!
I don’t use The Trainline for internet booking as they charge a £1 booking fee and £3.50 for using credit cards, whereas train companies websites (mainly run by The Trainline, I know) do not.
Also, I think the delivery option with The Trainline is next day delivery at £7.50, with the free first class post option discontinued.
I also find it very convenient printing the tickets out when I place the order, rather than having to remember whether they’ve subsequently turned up in the post.
I used to use the GNER website a lot with its “mixing deck” style of presenting ticket prices, but more recently under National Express East Coast (NXEC) found it didn’t always get the ticket prices right. Sometimes they were cheaper than the others on non-NXEC tickets, but other times missed out the cheaper advance fares.
I tend to use TPE now (which I know is run for them by the Trainline), but check there aren’t any cheap prices on NXEC, now East Coast.
East Coast only tickets are 10% cheaper on their site than elsewhere.
Advance good value Wrexham & Shropshire tickets have to be bought on W&S’ website.
John
March 22nd, 2010 at 8:49 am
The advantage of the Trainline or Qjump websites is that they show all of the fares. Train company websites will not necessarily show advance purchase fares for other train companies (as you have found out). So I find the cheapest fare on the Trainline website and then ring them up (08457 222 333) to actually book the tickets to avoid paying any extra for postage and credit/debit card use.
They answer the phone by saying “Virgin Trainline”, but because Virgin has to abide by the terms of impartial retailing they will in fact sell you a ticket for any rail journey in Britain.
March 22nd, 2010 at 1:42 pm
I personally think a risk of buying anything by phone (including a train ticket) is that the person at the other end of the phone can press a wrong button and you finish up with the wrong item and you’ve got no proof that they’ve sent you the wrong item. Buying online you get confirmation of what you’ve entered in the form of an email and your iteinary by email.
One thing to be aware of with the East Coast website is it lists Metrolink stations but if you select one it can give you the fare for another e.g. enter Chester to Old Trafford at present and it tries to sell you a Chester to Stretford ticket.
April 9th, 2010 at 2:47 am
I know that booking ‘On-Line’ is fast becoming the way of booking tickets.
However I always prefer when booking tickets to use the good old fashioned Booking Office where you can actually talk to somebody who is willing to go through the various ticket types to get you a good deal.
I don’t think you will ever beat the human touch.
May 21st, 2010 at 7:48 pm
Printing your tickets at home is a relatively new concept on rail and is something that we are really keen to push forward. It has gradually grown up from a number of individual schemes at different train operating companies. At First TransPennine Express we offer Print @ Home on journeys to Manchester Airport. This route was chosen for our trial as it’s our most self contained route for a trial and there’s a good fit with the airline market. We are now actively looking at how we can expand the trial to the rest of our network, the key consideration being how we can manage the fraud risk through scanning the barcodes on the tickets.
We believe that customers really appreciate Print @ Home because they both find it a similar method of collecting their tickets and find that having all of their travel details in front of them really enhances the customer’s experience.
The complexities of Print @ Home mean that the industry hasn’t yet cracked interoperability of Print @ Home meaning the ability to use one ticket on more than one operator or being able to sell another operator’s tickets with the option to print the ticket off at home. We are though currently working as an industry to push this forward and this is now at a fairly advanced stage meaning we hope that you’ll soon be able to print off your own ticket wherever you are travelling.
Please rest assured we appreciate the benefits that Print @ Home affords and are working hard to develop a workable solution in the near future.