Hi all,
Two days before the walk on Sunday 7 July 2019 our secretary Maurice and the ramble leader of the day Roger Yelland offered some helpful sdvice about queuing for train tickets at Victoria. In the two days before the walk the advice was read enough times to make it one of the 15 most visited pages in July. So I thought it would be useful to adapt it slightly and leave it on the website as general guidance to travelling from Victoria where the queues can be very long especially in summer time when day trippers are thronging to the south coast resorts:

Please note that the queues at the Victoria ticket office have been 
lengthy and slow moving recently. On one occasion in the last two 
weeks I queued for more than 30m.
If you have a Freedom Pass (and Railcard) a ticket can be bought 
easily and fairly quickly (normally) at the machines: entering the name of the Station 
of Origin as the last one within the travel card zone that you know the train to be calling at [or just "Boundary"] and Station of Destination as  the station to which you are travelling, and choosing the Railcard option. 

The problem with the machines comes if you are buying a ticket from 
Station of Origin: Victoria. You are entitled to buy a SOPDR (SUPER 
Off Peak Day Return): cost £13 with a Railcard in one example), BUT the machines will 
only sell you a OPDR in that example for £16.25.
To get the SOPDR for £13 you need to join the queue for the ticket 
office. And the problem here is that I suspect that they are reducing 
the number of staff at the ticket offices in order to "persuade" us to 
use the ticket machines. Hence the lengthy queues.

Confused? So was I!

Best Wishes

Maurice=