Pay your rail parking by text in the UK

Now this is a good idea.  This has been a thorn in my side for absolutely ages.  Here’s the real world problem that has been solved for me:

1. You need to drive to the station for whatever reason. You’re late. You’re carrying some huge laptop. You’re bringing home shopping. Anything, right?
2. You don’t have a ‘season ticket’
3. You need to park your car then walk all the way up to the station to buy the parking ticket. Invariably you can only find a space RIGHT AT THE END of the car park, so it’s a good 5 minutes walk each way. 
4. Once at the station you have to wait in a queue to buy your rail ticket and parking ticket.
5. You then have to spend 5 minutes walking BACK to your car to put it’s ticket in the window.
6. THEN you have to walk BACK to the station to catch the train: meanwhile you’ve watched 2-3 trains go in and out of the station already.
7. You’ve used up at least 20 minutes.

Finally Verrus has fixed this problem.  I haven’t come across them before.  Their site reports:

If you want to accept payments via mobile phone, integrate mobile
elements into your marketing programs, open new communication channels
to your customers or use wireless technologies to improve your business
processes, Verrus can help.

They’ve been doing this all over the place – from Winnipeg to Yale University to York.  I found out about their UK service when I went to pay for a ticket the other day and saw their leaflet on display.

Here’s five good reasons to use the service:

And here’s how you work it — really elegant and simple:

Fantastically good. 

Now you can:

1. Park
2. Get on the train
3. Pay for your ticket whilst you’re sat on the train

I’m going to give it a go the next time I’m going to drive.  This should, I imagine, be available at your local suburban station as well.