After cardboard tickets, the more than 3,000 composting machines will disappear from French stations starting this year (725 for TGV and Intercités, 2,468 for TER). It’s a new part of railway heritage taking off…
Orange and mechanical in the 1980s, replaced by yellow electronic terminals in the 2000s, they were part of the landscape, marking the starting point of a train journey.
Mandatory step to validate your ticket before boarding, this stage often forced the traveler to some contortions (going round and round the sesame) to obtain the famous ‘clack’ that acted as validation. It’s true, it never worked the first time…
96-99% of tickets are now digital
But stamping your ticket doesn’t make much sense nowadays. First of all, today’s tickets are usually valid for a specific travel date. As it did not happen before, a ticket was valid for two months, which made composting essential to freeze the moment a user took his train and avoid several trips with the same ticket.
Above all, the ticket is now massively dematerialized (the electronic ticket was launched in 2010). “More than 99% of the TGV-Intercités tickets are already digital. In TER, only 4% of the tickets still need to be stamped. In short, depending on the line, 96 to 99% of the tickets are already digital”, explains the SNCF to us. As for the cardboard ticket, as we have said, it is also destined to disappear.
“Therefore, we have decided to remove the composters from our stations because the vast majority of our customers no longer have to compost their tickets. Given the rate of digitization and the aging of the compost park, the removal of this equipment becomes a no-brainer. They represent a significant maintenance load each year,” adds the spokesperson.
Framed
The SNCF highlights an improvement in the customer journey with “a simplified customer gesture, a more fluid customer journey, the end of composting errors”.
However, this dismantling will have to be supervised, particularly with the major ones already lost to the galloping dematerialization. “To avoid any misunderstanding or surprise effect, customers will be informed of the end of composting. Consumer associations have already been informed of this project”, says the spokesman.
Starting this month of January, stickers will be placed on compost bins as well as on ATMs to warn of this new rule.
For the few customers who do not have an electronic ticket but a paper one (paper, IATA format, etc.), when accessing the train they must appear before the skipper to have the ticket validated. “If the client does not show up, the skipper will remind him of the procedure during the control when he passes in the passenger’s car,” warns the operator.
Source: BFM TV
