In 1963, as the cost-cutting axe fell on railway branch lines across the country, the popular songwriters Flanders and Swann mourned their loss in elegiac verse: “No one departs, no one arrives / From Selby to Goole, from St Erth to St Ives / They’ve all passed out of our lives.”
Sixty years on, the prospect of a similarly brutal cull looms over almost every station ticket office in England. As part of an exercise as shortsighted, sweeping and peremptory as the mass line closures imposed by Dr Richard Beeching in the 1960s, train companies recently announced plans to phase out hundreds of ticket offices over the course of the next three years. A token public consultation period for this proposal – risibly short at a mere 21 days – will end in less than two weeks’ time. After that perfunctory nod to growing public disquiet, the process of pulling down the shutters at the vast majority of the country’s 1,007 remaining ticket offices is due to begin.
This is a process which needs to be stopped in its tracks. The train operators – pressured by a government which, here as in other matters, knows the price of everything and the value of nothing – have presented the closures as part of a necessary modernisation programme. It is true that most train tickets are now sold digitally or at station vending machines. But the suggestion that, from Purley to Preston, ticket office staff will be liberated to take up “new and engaging” platform roles is for the birds. The transparent end goal is to save money by radically reducing the number of staff necessary to run a functioning station.
The downsides of going down this path are multiple: confused passengers seeking expert help en route, or before departure, will be left to talk to the wall; disabled people relying on assistance and in need of a supportive travel environment will receive a far poorer service; women returning home in the dark will feel less secure; and the elderly, the less digitally savvy and the digitally excluded will find rail travel more difficult and more off‑putting. As a bare minimum, a full equality impact assessment should be undertaken before any closures take place.
More broadly, at a time when the government should be thinking of ways to encourage more people to use public transport instead of their cars, the plans testify to an abject failure of imagination. “Modernisation” does not have to mean closures and cuts, justified by a kind of digital determinism. In Switzerland, for example, the national railway company has collaborated with a food retailer to offer the full range of ticket services in station shops. Liverpool city region has used devolved powers to pilot similar schemes on the Merseyrail network. The Rail Reform Group, a campaigning body made up of senior rail professionals, has made the case for investing in stations as community hubs and information centres, incorporating ticketing services.
When valued and peopled, train stations can be welcoming and energising places. They can be rethought and reconfigured for digital times, but preserving the human factor must be non‑negotiable. Or as the former Paralympian Tanni Grey-Thompson put it last week in a tweet: “So far all my assistance has gone well today. Do you know what made it work? People. People being at the station.”
