News from the East Anglian Branch of Railfuture, Edited by Martin Thorne and Jerry Alderson.
Railfuture News Snippets 264 - 30/04/2015
Railfuture has announced that its summer conference in 2016 will be in Scotland on the route of the Borders Railway, which is being reopened in September 2015. The autumn conference in 2016 will be in Birmingham, a year after the major re-vamp of Birmingham New Street station has been completed and Midlands Metro trams run to it. Go to www.railfuture.org.uk/conferences to book attendance and see a list of future and past conferences.
Felixstowe TraveWatch will be holding its AGM at 19:30 on Tuesday 26th May 2015 at the Salvation Army Church, Cobbold Road in Felixstowe. The guest speaker is David Cattermole, Managing Director of Galloway Coaches.
Abellio Greater Anglia will be holding a press call at Norwich station on 1st May to reveal the first fully refurbished nine-coach InterCity train. It will then leave at 11:00 destined for London Liverpool Street.
WEBSITES
Abellio Greater Anglia to pilot use of money-saving MultiPass mobile app for multiple train journeys
Keywords: [Class700]
A virtual travel pass system for rail passengers on Abellio Greater Anglia services between Cambridge and London is been piloted. The system developed by MultiPass (see their http://multipass.co.uk website) makes use of a smart-phone app and aims to eliminate the need for paper tickets and ticket machines with passengers passing freely through stations. However, it does much more than that as passengers do not need to worry about what ticket they needed to buy - it follows the passenger around the network across a week and at the end of the week charges them the cheapest fare that they could have paid, e.g. because they made sufficient journeys for a weekly season ticket to be cheaper. This truly radical approach could, if successful, remove one of the greatest barriers to rail user, the issue of fare complexity. The pilot will be undertaken by a small group of passengers on specific routes such as Cambridge to Liverpool Street, but if successful it will be made available to everyone and expanded to cover the Greater Anglia network. Of course, it will only be really useful if it can take account of all types of train tickets (including rovers and rangers) and covers the entire rail network but that would require commercial buy-in by all operators - something that is not likely to happen quickly, not least because operators, rather than MultiPass, would be taking the revenue risk.
Railfuture East Anglia Branch News Snippets 264 - 30/04/2015
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