Radical new train ticket test to ask for travel based on GPS movements

Even train tickets with the help of a QR code may soon be outdated, where passengers follow their journeys on their phones instead.

From today, a new type of ticket will be tested, which uses GPS data to work out which trains have been taken and the distance traveled.

The idea is that passengers do not have to buy a ticket in advance, but check in with an app and automatically charged the best value at the end of the day.

For ticket inspections and to go through ticket barriers, a unique barcode appears in the app to be scanned.

The nine months ‘Pay as you go’ test runs on four routes performed by East Midlands Railway and Northern.

It is intended to make rates easier, but a charity boss warned that services should still have easy access without a smartphone, with research that shows that more than five million people are struggling in the UK because of everything that goes online.

Contactless ticketing is already ‘popular’ in London and the southeast, and the government is planning to roll it out in Greater Manchester and the West Midlands.

Although many love the convenience of tapping and out, not everyone is happy with the switch to a telephone needed for everything, from parking to paying for shopping.

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Recent research by Age UK showed that many elderly people are unhappy with the pace of change, with a considerable number ‘not online at all’.

The study showed that 1 in 3 (31%) of those older than 60 – equivalent to 5.1 million people – said that life is much more difficult compared to five years ago because the things they want to do are online, while more than half (53%) of the respondents felt frustrated by being recommended online, instead of personal or telephone.

Charity Director Caroline Abrahams told Metro: ‘There is no doubt that there are many benefits for the elderly who can navigate with apps on smartphones or want to go online and can do this.

“But it is really important that whether older people use computers or not, they still have easy access to the services they need.”

It is also not clear what would happen if the telephone battery of a passenger was used up during their journey, since GPS services will not work if this happens (something that can also be a problem for standard e-tickets).

Alex Hornby, Northern Rail Commercial Boss, said: ‘Historically, ticketing in the railway industry has been far too complicated and therefore everything that makes the customer experience easier, has my voice.

“We have already seen a huge swing from physical tickets to digital alternatives, which now make up more than 80% of the trips on our network.”

Trials are initially limited to 1,000 passengers on each route, where people can register via the website of the train operators.

The government said that the GPS technology has already been tested ‘broad’ in Switzerland, Denmark and Scotland, but never in England.

The plans are supported by nearly a million pounds of government financing, intended as part of broader plans to revise the rail system, to bring most train operators to public ownership by 2027.

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