PLANS to close a station ticket office all weekend will go ahead.

South West Trains has decided to cut down the hours of 11 ticket offices, including the one at Whitchurch station, following a public consultation held in March.

The decision means an end to Saturday opening. The office is currently closed on Sundays but manned between 6am and 10.25am on Saturdays. From Monday to Friday the office is open from 6am to 11.15am.

The train company said that the new hours would come into operation “in the autumn”.

Whitchurch borough councillor Keith Watts said he was disappointed, and added: “I’m a rail traveller myself and the alternative is to use the ticket machine, but where that’s situated, when the sun shines you can’t see it and when it rains you can’t see it. It’s also very complicated to understand.”

Public consultation on the changes was carried out in conjunction with the official independent passenger watchdog, Passenger Focus.

South West Trains has gone ahead with the planned closure after less than a fifth of passengers said that they did not want to use ticket machines.

But the survey also found that passengers travelling in groups, particularly families and children, needed advice on how to buy the cheapest ticket.

Cllr Watts agreed that for many people ticket machines were not suitable and said: “If the ticket office isn’t going to open then they need to accept that the conductors need to sell tickets instead, rather than people getting on the trains without a ticket and being fined.”

South West Trains spokesman Emma Knight said that the changes met the Department for Transport’s criteria. She added: “More than 50 per cent of customers now choose to purchase their travel through ticket vending machines, over the phone and on the Internet.”

But Cllr Watts said: “It’s no good assuming that people will use the Internet to buy tickets because a lot of people don’t have the Internet or don’t know how to use it. We want people to have help buying tickets.”

South West Trains said it was investing millions of pounds to make ticket purchase easier and to improve security, and by next month the CCTV systems at all stations would be linked to a 24-hour control centre.