Ticket Chaos at St. Albans City Station

You'd expect it to be busy at the ticket desks and machines at the station on the first day back after the Christmas holidays, but you'd also expect First Capital to put some effort into having the appropriate staff levels to deal with the easily anticipated morning rush. Well, they didn't - leading to a queue that went not only out the door but down by the taxi rank during the morning rush hour, causing many commuters to stand out in the -3 cold for half an hour or longer and to miss their trains.

This would be somewhat forgivable if I wasn't one of a number of commuters who, planning ahead, visited the station at about 17.30 on Sunday to renew my monthly, which costs a whopping £256 a month without the tube, only to find a half hour queue awaited us even then.

Part of the problem, as was evident when overhearing people asking for returns to destinations such as Luton, London and Bedford, is that people don't seem to want to use the ticket machines. That wasn't the case this morning - the machines on the station side were all in use and had queues to get to them - but at least 5 people in the queue in front of me Sunday could have, but didn't, use the machines.

But here's a tip - this morning you could have beat the queue and caught your train by simply going to the city side of the station, by platform four, and using the ticket machines there, where there wasn't a queue.