Chip and Pin Rollout
 

Chip and pin is rolling out at ticket machines

Connolly and Tara Street have them and others

Note the software is not user friendly, just ignore the instruction to insert AND remove the card

Insert card, use the pin pad and when it says complete, remove the card

Sometimes I despair at the thought of Irish Rail ever getting anything right. It's not a major issue but surely at least one person in IR tried a credit card payment and wondered why the instructions were so blatantly wrong.

to be fair, this is a common problem with some ATMS also, which tell you to do this when it is wrong.

Feedback and suggestions are in with Irish Rail's tech/marketing people this morning

Speaking of ATMs, I've had three completed transactions recently where it just didn't give me the money, compared to one in the previous 20 years.

I noticed the chip and pin Pearse last night.

I managed to work it despite the instructions!

Great that I found this forum! My girlfriend has tried to topup her smartcard twice in the last week using chip and pin. On both occasions (in different stations) the money was taken from her bank account but not credited to the smartcard.
Seems IR haven't bothered to fully test chip and pin transactions.
The helpful suggestion from customer service was "have you tried topping up online", completely disregarding the fact that my girlfriend was down money already without getting topped up.

The classic transaction failure on a smartcard is to place the card in the reader and then remove it

Then,
1. Select top up
2. Insert debit/credit card
3. Do transaction
4. Remove ebit/credit card
5. Asks for smartcard to be returned
6. If card not returned transaction aborts and if cash returns the cash, the problem is refunds to debit/credit cards take several days to flow through the system. You are not down money it will come back the delay is a function of the Irish banking system not Irish Rail

Previously the system would abort without asking for the smartcard to be returned to machine, we worked with Irish Rail to get the return the smartcard to machine message in place.

For the record I have topped up my smartcard with my chip and chip debit card with no problems. As Irish Rail's smartcard people know we are innovative in our testing and we found several problems last year during a test we performed, one of which Irish Rail could not replicate despite many hours of testing. I was summoned to Connolly and in 10 seconds triggered the bug.

One very simple question, after the attempts did the ticket machine refuse to respond when the smartcard button was pushed?

Drop us an email info@railusers.ie with the dates/stations/amounts etc and the smartcard number and I will pass them to the senior IT people/smartcard managers. A description of what happened, i.e was the smartcard in the holder on the machine throughout or not would be very very helpful