What a difference a day makes,
24 little hours!

For those of you that commute on SWT, you are sure to know by now that yesterday was chaotic, when a major fire closed down the London to Woking mainline for around an hour. The public were to an extent very smpathetic... I did not do a ticket check, being as we were around an hour late leaving London, but I did take a wander up and down the train, taking my machine with me so that I could use the onboard timetable to offer new connections.

Everyone was not happy, but they were subdued and sat watching the world go by, or keeping themselves occupied. ou would expect with the trains up the spout that they wold be looking for blood....

Then comes today.

All goes well, for the first hour.

I come to a station in the countryside. I am still checking some coaches for the first time since we left London as it is a busy commuter train. A well dressed woman (about mid 30's I guess) asks for a ticket to the next station. Later a second woman told me she had infact got on at London, paying around a fifth of the actual fare, and she does it quite often.

So we come into the next station, and instead of leaving the train, she goes into the toilet...shame I was watching her at the time! So I politely ask her to leave, and she casually forgot that she had infact parked her car at the NEXT station 20 minutes away and can she have another ticket.... Im sorry but lying once is bad, but TWICE!

She refused to leave the train so we had to call in the police to have her removed, 15 minutes later passengers were getting irate, at me for delaying the train, and at her for delaying the train. In the end it took two passengers to threaten to man-handle her off the train, for her to think about leaving the train, because my issue is quite simple: She was evading the fare. I also suspect that she evaded it in the morning, to get to work in the first place. If she gets away with it every day for a working week, she is evading £200 of fares, which 99% of the other passengers pay (whether the agree with it or not).

So anyway we leave, and all I then get is greif from the passengers on board that I held the train up for 15 minutes..... that will be the same passengers who will complain that the tickets have gone up double what they should because we are not catching fare evaders!