This time next week, commuters won't be able to buy a train ticket on the vast majority of stations on the South Coast line.
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On August 1, all paper tickets on NSW public transport will be scrapped and can no longer be used for travel.
The only options for travel will be an Opal card or an Opal single-trip ticket.
The cardboard single-trip tickets cannot be sold by station staff and can only be bought from dedicated Opal single-trip ticket machines.
Only 10 of 32 stations on the South Coast line have these machines.
Transport for NSW (TfNSW) has stated that, with Opal accounting for 95 per cent of trips on the network, there was not a need to have a single-trip ticket machine on every platform.
On the South Coast line, there are nine unmanned stations – none of which have a ticket machine.
That means commuters on those platforms will not be able to buy a ticket or be told by staff what they needed to do.
A TfNSW spokeswoman said the Opal campaign had intensified in recent weeks and by August 1 “those few remaining customers who used old paper tickets will have moved onto Opal”.
This included a wide-ranging poster campaign to alert commuters of the coming deadline for the retirement of paper tickets.
“Any customer appearing at a station without an Opal card will be educated on how to get and use an Opal card,” she said.
She also said staff will have discretion on how to manage commuters who do not have an Opal card or single-trip ticket.
“However they will be on the lookout for fare evaders using this transition period as an excuse to avoid paying the appropriate fare,” she said.