In 2010, at Chiltern Railways, we created the first barcode ticketing app in the British rail industry. Customers could buy a ticket on their phone and show it to be scanned. I later kicked off the industry programme to roll barcode ticketing nationwide.
Three years after that first app, I tried to bring another kind of ticketing to Chiltern Railways, and failed. London had just launched contactless payment on its buses, with the Tube and rail network to follow. It was obviously the future. Our customers were already using it when they reached London, and it made no sense that they should tap their way seamlessly around the capital and then queue at a machine to travel with us.
But the British government’s preferred ticketing standard was a domestic smartcard system. My aim was to divert some of that budget into a contactless pilot on Chiltern, but I couldn’t get it done. So instead of contactless, Chiltern got the smartcards, which customers barely used.
Contactless finally arrived at Chiltern stations in June 2024, eleven years later. By then, whole countries had moved on to something better.
I learned two things from those years, and this report is built on both. First, the mobile phone is a superb delivery mechanism for transport ticketing. Second, give customers the current technology, not one from the previous cycle. If you take them back a whole technology cycle, they will notice.
