For those of you who wish to purchase rail passes for the Papal Visit, the following message was recently posted on the SEPTA website.
Message for Customers:
SEPTA has suspended sales for the remainder of the day for One Day Regional Rail passes for the Papal Visit due to technical problems. Tomorrow morning we will provide advanced notice to our riders the public and the media regarding when pass sales will resume.
While SEPTA was prepared for high volume when online sales began at 9 a.m. today, the traffic to the e-commerce site launched for pass sales was significantly higher than anticipated. During a 10-minute period after the sales site launched at 9 a.m., we received approximately 900,000 visits, and approximately 1,700 transactions were attempted per second.
Most transactions were not completed, and therefore, most of the Regional Rail One Day passes are still available for customers to purchase when sales resume. There are approximately 175,000 passes available for each day of the Papal Visit – or approximately 350,000 total for Sept. 26 and 27 combined.
With the extraordinary number of people expected to attend events during the Papal Visit, SEPTA will be more than doubling Regional Rail service capacity on Saturday, September 26 and Sunday, September 27, 2015 by modifying the regular weekend operations plan.
