The other week over on Reddit somebody asked why there was a V/Line branded ticket office at Box Hill station, despite the fact that no V/Line trains run there. The answer – it’s a long one, of course.
In the beginning
Back in the “good old days” paper tickets ruled the railways, each one of them individually numbered, and sold for a specific combination of origin and destination.
PROV image VPRS 12903/P0001, 237/08
As you might expect, that added up to a lot of tickets.
PROV image VPRS 12903/P0001, 015/04
Which took up a lot of space in a ticket office.
PROV image VPRS 12903/P0001, 015/02
The poor ticketing clerk being surrounded by them!
PROV image VPRS 12903/P0001, 015/06
So the Victorian Railways separated out the ticket offices at major stations – for example Spencer Street had separate ‘suburban’ ticket offices.
PROV image VPRS 12903/P0001, 015A/09
And Flinders Street Station directed country passengers to a single ticket offices at the ‘Centre’ entrance opposite Degraves Street.
PROV image VPRS 12800/P0003, ADV 1691
Times change
By the 1980s reforms to suburban tickets saw a new system introduced – first the ‘Neighbourhood’ paper tickets, followed by zone based “Scratch” tickets, massively reducing the number of tickets to be sold.
And then cut back even further with the introduction of Metcard, and the on-demand encoding of pre-printed tickets by automated machines.
V/Line also went through a similar modernisation, switching to tickets printed on-demand by a computer terminal.
And then in 2013 something resembling a unification of the two systems, when Myki was rolled out to the V/Line network, as “one system to rule them all”.
But with one exception – the rollout of Myki to long distance V/Line services was dropped, leaving them using the legacy paper ticket system, which need to be issued via a computer system dedicated to the task.
And today
Southern Cross Station still has separate suburban and country ticket offices – Metro Trains Melbourne runs ticket offices on the Collins Street and Bourke Street concourses.
While V/Line runs their ticket offices at the Spencer Street entrance to the station, and beneath the Bourke Street Bridge.
Flinders Street Station also splits the ticket offices – there is a V/Line ‘Regional Tickets’ window beside the Metro Trains Melbourne ‘Customer Service’ counter.
Melbourne Central has a V/Line branded ‘Regional Trains’ window at the Swanston Street end of the station.
Oakleigh has a wooden door with a ‘Country / Interstate Booking Office’ sign on it.
And back to what triggered this post – Box Hill station has a little V/Line branded room beside the ticket office.
Footnote: printing paper tickets
As you might have guessed, selling each passenger a paper ticket every time they travelled used up a lot of paper – a million tickets a week.
PROV image VPRS 12903/P0001, 680/07
So the Victorian Railways ran their own printing works on Laurens Street, North Melbourne.
PROV image VPRS 12903/P0001, 020/15
And then sent them to a room at head office – 67 Spencer Street.
PROV image VPRS 12903/P0001, 159/08
Where staff would stamp the unique serial number onto each ticket blank.
PROV image VPRS 12903/P0001, 159/06
Footnote: a weird franchise fact
With suburban trains being operated by Metro Trains Melbourne and country trains by V/Line, the franchise agreements need to specify who is responsible for what. First, V/Line trains need access to Metro stations:
Schedule 7
Interoperator Agreements
Part 1 Mandatory Interoperator Agreements
1 Access Agreements
(a) The V/Line Passenger Access Agreement.
(b) The Station Access Agreement – NSW TrainLink for access by NSW Trains (ABN 50 325 560 455) to tracks leased by the Franchisee from PTV.
And V/Line has to have access to the ticket offices located in stations managed by Metro.
– The Sublease for the ticket office box at Flinders Street Station dated 20 November 2009 between the Franchisee and V/Line.
– The Station Agreement for access by V/Line to stations leased by the Franchisee from PTV.
Sounds like the only winners are the lawyers paid to write up these agreements.
That certainly explains how it happened, but I’m not sure anything can explain why V/Line still has a standalone booking office at Box Hill, when at most other staffed/Premium stations, Metro staff can book V/Line tickets.
I wonder if they really get enough sales to make it worthwhile?
It’s not a standalone V/Line office, just inside that room is another window into the Metro booking office, and the desk behind it has the V/Line computer and ticket printer.
The neighbourhood ticketing system was a complicated mess but could have been much better if it was properly implemented. Instead of tickets specific to each neighbourhood, if they’d simply implemented a zone-based system where fares are a multiple of the number of neighbourhoods or zones that the journey passes through, it could have been a forerunner to the kind of zonal fare system common in Central Europe.
As an aside, why do Victorian railway stations typically only have one entry/exit? Why didn’t Victoria adopt a proof-of-payment system rather than the gated system we have today?
I think there’s signage (or advertising) at Moorabbin (maybe on the ramp down to platforms 1 & 2) saying you can buy your V/Line tickets there – maybe that’s a throwback to when you needed a paper ticket to get to Kardinia Park!
In the past I’ve bought V/Line tickets for Shepparton at Broadmeadows to avoid the Zone 1 surcharge, by starting and ending with suburban trains (coming in from Footscray, avoiding Southern Cross and only needing to cross the platform at North Melbourne to change trains). Could still travel that way now but would need to buy my paper ticket at Footscray and not use Myki, to get the fare cap and not pay double.
The VNet computer system is so hard to operate and the error prompts make so little sense that you don’t know what you did wrong.
The information about the paper tickets is fascinating. Without computers, how the hell did they know if the service was full or not?
Basically they assigned blocks of seats to different booking offices where they expected to sell tickets, and then rebalanced as needed. Booking from a station without a block of seats they would need to contact one that did. All managed out of Central Reservations in Head Office at 67 Spencer St. Interstate trains got even more complex!
Offshoot to that question, does the Box Hill office ever sell a ticket these days?
I have bought tickets there, but they are so slow that I book online and just get them printed there instead.
Example a few weeks back at Heidelberg (which also has a VLine branded window) it took about 12 minutes to get a return ticket to Maryborough
There is a V/Line coach that stops at Box Hill, the Mansfield to Melbourne office. The V/line ticket office is probably to allow people to buy / print the paper tickets for the coach service.
The V/Line website suggests most staffed stations sell tickets, and have received the same advice from the department of transport. When however, I have tried to buy from a staffed station, the Metro staff claim V/Line tickets are not in fact sold here. The only exception was Greensborough, at least a few years ago.
I now have no idea, short of travelling to southern cross, where I can buy long distance tickets. Even when booking online, I seem to need to collect the paper ticket from a booking office.