How long is it going to take for train company Southern to sort out the latest problem it has caused, this time by installing useless new ticket machines at Brighton Station?

With the old Quickfare machines, you pressed one button for your

destination, another for the type of ticket, put your money in and your ticket came out. The machines sold the most popular tickets and were fairly reliable.

With the new touch-screen machines, you have to work your way through a dozen different displays, selecting your options one after the other, and when you get to the end, which is an achievement in itself, you are likely to find the machine refuses your credit card, or swallows it.

Last week, I had to get a member of staff to open the machine and extract my card.

On Monday, none of the three machines, which were supposedly working, would accept my card and I ended up having to queue for a ticket and missing my train.

The machines are meant to be an improvement, being programmed to sell tickets for any station, but the design of their software is illogical, which makes them too complicated for most people to use. As a result, they keep breaking, which then leads people to miss their trains.

This has been going on for about two months. Why doesn't Southern deliver an ultimatum to the machine supplier, to sort the problem out quickly or take them away?

This is another misapplication of half-baked, slightly out-of-date technology. In this day and age, why do passengers need to buy tickets at all?

What is needed is some kind of debit swipe card, pre-programmed to give discounts to students and the elderly. Something like the London Oyster card would do nicely.

The concept is not rocket science. So why can't those running Southern get their act together?

Henry Law

-Queen's Gardens, Brighton