Dramatic Change at the Station!

Well it's pretty dramatic if you've ever tried to buy a ticket from the ticket machine at Charlton Station when it's raining. It's a touch screen machine and one it's got wet it's really unreliable. I've tried various tactics from the "stab it until your finger hurts" to "rub it gently" to try and buy tickets, it either takes a long time or it just plain wouldn't work.

The new cover seems to work pretty well. Unfortunately it went about about a day late last week. On the Wednesday there was travel chaos around here as the tunnel was shut. The roads jammed up and buses were going nowhere, so many people were trying to catch the train to get where they needed to be. So a lot of people needed tickets. And it was raining. Lo and behold there was a massive queue inside the station as people tried the machine without any luck.

Thankfully the ticket office was actually open, all too often the staff seem to nip off home at about 5pm (they're meant to be open until about half 7, see here, I should chase that up), leaving the machine the only hope.

Did the huge queues last Wednesday prompt the hasty order for a shelter? Or was it SE Trains finally pulling their finger out and trying to offer a genuine service to us poor "customers"?