Hand Validations

The above examples were issued when a passenger had arrived at Flinders Street station without a ticket. As the passenger was within the bounds of the "paid area", a valid ticket was needed to exit through the electronic barriers. For this reason, a booking office was located within the paid area in the vicinity of the ramps to platforms 6&7 and 8&9 at the St.Kilda Road end of Flinders Street station. When a ticket was issued from here, it was hand validated by the booking office clerk. The ticket was shown to a Customer Service Employee attending the barrier, who would then manually allow the person to exit. This was due to the barriers not recognizing the electronically unvalidated ticket, as it hadn't first been validated to "enter" the system. On re-entry to the system, any validator would recognize the ticket as valid and allow the passenger to enter as normal. The example shown on the above left was never electronically validated to legally allow the person to use the system at all! The above ticket is hand validated for essentially the same reason as the first two. At the city end of Richmond station there is an exit subway that is opened only for sporting and special events. The northern end serves the MCG and the southern basically serves the Tennis Centre and Multi-Purpose Venue. Interestingly, the southern exit has a standard validator only, and no fare gates; whilst the northern (Brunton Avenue) exits are guarded by a large bank of electronic barriers. The booking office here is manned firstly to deal with passengers who have arrived without a valid ticket and accounts for the "VALIDATED RICHMOND" hand stamp, and later in the evening to deal with ticket sales for crowds going home. In theory, this example should have been electronically validated to re-enter the system. As both these booking offices are manned only as required, they were not fitted with a BOM, but supplied with pre-encoded tickets. The "VALIDATED SPENCER ST" example is different again, and owes its existance to the Colonial Stadium complex. There is a large footbridge which extends from Bourke Street to the stadium which passes the northern ends of the Spencer Street suburban platforms (and country platforms 3&4). Each of these has a flight of stairs and two escalators between the platform and the footbridge. At first, only a temporary "ATCO" booking office was provided (located on the Colonial Stadium side of the platform 13/14 exit). This has recently been replaced by a more permanent structure. A passenger arriving without a ticket would be directed by a Customer Service Employee to purchase one from this booking office. Importantly, as there are currently no automatic fare gates or validators on the footbridge, all tickets issued from here would be hand validated at the time of issue. Again, only pre-encoded tickets are stocked.

Illegible Validation?

It appears that as the expiry date did not print correctly during the validation procedure, the passenger presented it at Box Hill booking office to have the expiry date hand stamped on it. It is not known whether the passenger chose to do this because it is a weekly ticket, or they were directed to do so by a staff member. This is the only example we have of this circumstance having occurred.

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