Before we start, can I just point out that whilst my original intended usage was train tickets, this software can in fact be used for any activity that requires ticketing.
If you've read about my time with the Cholsey and Wallingford Railway, you may have noted that whilst I was acting as Station Master I was doubling up as Booking Clerk! If you've looked elsewhere on this site you might also suspect that I had a career in Computer Software before retiring. It should therefore not be too much of a surprise to you that I wrote some programs to help with ticketing side of things. So here are some brief notes and screenshots for those programs.
The first program started as a few attempts with spreadsheets, but I rapidly outgrew that idea and thus Train Tickets Suite was born. It covers the setting up of a fares schedule, the recording of ticket sales and the reconciliation of the sales with the cash taken. There are panels for each of those activities selected via a tab bar. There is a fourth pane which allows the maximum ticket number to be selected as different possible types of tickets have different numbers of digits for serial numbers and the program needs to be able to cope with what happens when you come to the end of a sequence and restart from zero. Above the tab bar is a simple menu bar that allows file operations for saving and restoring the data.
To make it hard for the user to make mistakes I have made it as hard as possible to enter invalid data! So for example, on the tickets schedule panel the only price that can be directly specified is the Adult Return fare, everything else is done by setting percentages of that value. I had to do that because setting up a schedule seems to be a black art! Before I wrote the programs I would regularly turn up, look at "today's fares" and say "but that's inconsistent!", usually the price of family tickets.
The C&WR has two stations, so naturally that is the scenario I wrote the program for. What about if you have only one station? That is easy enough. If you charge say £5 a ride then enter £10 in the Adult Return box, deselect all the inappropriate ticket types and set the percentages for Singles. And if you have more stations? That's a problem. To add that ability would rapidly run foul of the combinatorial problem, in otherwords one would need to be using a database system rather than a simple flat file program. Keeping the user interface simple basically goes out of the window and I have a thing about keeping things simple, so sorry about that people. However, it occured to me that the panel used for setting setting prices could still be useful for those with more stations as it could simply be used repeatedly for each possible pair of stations. Hence I extracted that panel into a separate program called Train Tickets Prices. That program may also be useful to the price setters on smaller railways if they are using a PC which won't be used by the Booking Clerks.
The only bit of faff is that the price setter needs to copy the prices data file to the PCs used by the Booking Clerks. Fortunately there are umpty ways of doing this, a USB stick, network sharing etc. The file always lives in the Libraries\My Documents folder for the user.
So why are there no printout facilities? The various screen layouts are specifically designed as working layouts. This will normally be different from the requirements for other uses, such as listings for ticket office diaplay, posters, magazine adverts etc. Also, anything I might presume for such uses may differ significantly from your house style. However, producing printouts is actually fairly easy for you to do as all the data files are in CSV format which are readable by programs such as spreadsheets, most of which have facilities for producing various types of output.
This slide show shows what Train Ticket Prices looks like in the first two images, the rest illustrate Train Tickets Suite...
