Rejoice, rejoice: the railway ticket office may yet be saved for the nation. Or more likely, it’s at least earned a brief reprieve. After a public outcry against plans to shut booths staffed by real live humans, train operators have relented and extended what was a suspiciously short three-week consultation.
Passengers will now have until September to make their point, shifting the exercise from a seemingly done deal to something at least vaguely pretending to be an open question, and hopefully allowing the voices of anxious disabled passengers in particular to be heard. It’s a victory, too, for anyone still foxed by the mad complexities of British train ticketing or forced by the general chaos, cancellation and delay towards the battle-scarred veterans of the ticket office, invariably the only people in the station who seem to know what’s actually happening. But beyond that, it sheds some light on how we all might like to be treated in an age of rapid automation.
