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Mystery of the failing Rail Magnetic Strips

By Sami Mughal

I am one of those people who use the train to get into work every day. For financial ease, I have ended up buying a monthly season ticket, and I was surprised at the amazing number of failures I was getting with these season tickets. The railway companies are pretty good about it, and if it fails, they issue you a replacement ticket straight away. I’d put ‘no questions asked’, but they do ask you your name and post code just to verify your id.

Anyway, my last failure occurred after 3 days of getting the new ticket, and my frustrations were getting a bit high. I had been trying different things, like not placing old tickets with the present one, etc. So I asked the ticket guy and he said, ‘No clue! Some say it is mobiles, some say it is heat!’

Mobiles!

Of course, the inner pocket where I store my ticket also tends to be my mobile pocket at times. So, as an experiment, I started keeping them separate. It has been three weeks and no failures so far.

Bit of research has shown that a lot of people have managed to get 9 or more months out of these, so there is no reason the magnetic strip should fail.

So at the moment, I am wondering if it is mobiles that cause the failure. I’ll keep you guys up to date if the theory works.


Update (14/03/2012): Yes, it worked. My season ticket lasted the whole month after I made sure that the mobile and the ticket stay away from each other. 

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3 thoughts on “Mystery of the failing Rail Magnetic Strips

  1. I keep my mobile in my bag and my season ticket in my pocket and since July 13 I have had 8 failures.. it is definitly not my mobile causing this. 🙁 BTW its a Southeastern Annual ticket.. never had problems with the monthly ticket

    1. Interesting. Things have definitely improved for me since I started putting my phone in a separate pocket. I do think all tickets issued by National Rail use the same technology.

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