Metro rail ticketing machines out of service at Agargaon station

Three ticket vending machines at the Agargaon metro rail station have been down since Monday morning, causing suffering to the enthusiastic passengers who queued up in front of the station defying the biting cold and foggy winter morning.

There are a total of three automated ticket vending machines in the Agargaon station for passengers to collect travel passes using a digital system, alongside the three other general ticket counters. 

Reportedly, one of the automated machines broke down at around 8.50am this morning after which the rest two also started to show technical glitches.

Most of the time only one machine was operative between 9am to 10am, according to media reports.

The metro rail technician team was seen working to fix the issues but the machines kept on going out of order one after another.

When down, the machine monitors either went all dark or showed alert messages like "This machine has been down for some time. Please use another machine or contact the ticket office" or "There is an error in the transaction process. Please wait for help. Sorry for the temporary inconvenience".

On condition of anonymity, an official of Agargaon station told Prothom Alo that many people are giving old notes to buy tickets while some are putting in crumpled notes. Again, the machine set-up was not done in a way to provide for all bank notes.