Britain’s biggest train company has ordered its guards to stop showing any discretion to passengers who are unable to buy tickets before boarding because of long queues at stations.

South West Trains (SWT) is forcing thousands of passengers to pay penalties, even though it admits that it does not have enough ticket machines and regularly breaches its commitment to keep no one waiting more than five minutes to buy a ticket.

It has told its guards not to accept any explanation from passengers and to charge the maximum peak fare, which is often double the normal fare.

Passengers travelling from London to Weymouth in Dorset are being charged £82 on board for a ticket that would have cost £35 if they had bought it at the station. They could be liable for an additional £20 penalty, or prosecuted, for fare evasion.

SWT has angered passengers in the past month by raising off-peak fares by 20 per cent.

Denis Fryer, of the South Hampshire Rail Users Group, said that SWT was profiting from its own failure to provide enough facilities for buying tickets. He said: “Passengers are being treated like fare-dodgers even when they have made a genuine effort to buy a ticket in advance. SWT is being greedy and unreasonable, especially because the problem is often its own failure to staff ticket offices properly.”

One train guard told The Times that he had been reprimanded by his manager for showing leniency to passengers who had clearly attempted to buy a ticket before boarding. “Even when people are completely honest and come up to us on the train to buy a ticket, we have to charge them the maximum fare,” he said. SWT admitted that it had failed to keep pace with the growth in demand for rail travel. The company said that it had ordered another 194 ticket machines for its network, although a spokeswoman said that the machines would not all be installed until September next year.

Passengers who waited longer than five minutes and had to buy a more expensive ticket on board “would have the option of contacting our customer relations department, who will look at each case individually”.

Passenger Focus, the Government-funded rail passenger watchdog, said that it was investigating complaints about penalties imposed by SWT. It said that it had complained to the company about its failure to meet its commitment on queueing time.

The company signed a new franchise last year under which it agreed to pay the Government £1.2 billion over 10 years. The company said it was being forced to find new ways of raising revenue to pay that sum.

Explore UK News

• Crime News

• Education News

• Health News

• Scotland News

Times Recommends

• The real-life adventures of Tintin the spy
• Our universities face a radical upheaval
• Doctor Who