Lottery to be held for regional rail passes for papal visit

SEPTA started promoting its particular one-day regional rail passes – good for Pope Francis’ September go to to Philadelphia – final Monday morning. They’ll make a more detailed announcement about that next week.

The company announced the lottery will begin on Monday, August 3, at 12:01 a.m. and will remain open until 11:59 p.m. The link to the lottery will be available at SEPTA’s website. Williams said that winning entries will not be selected until after the close of the submission period, so it doesn’t matter what time an entry is submitted or from where.

The new lottery system costs about $300,000, and will only be used for regional rail papal passes and papal passes for the Norristown High Speed Line and the 101 and 102 trolleys, Williams said.

SEPTA spent $110,000 on the site designed by Philly-based firm CapTech that crashed last week, Williams said. SEPTA said the site, which will be found on their website, www.septa.org, is being built. An earlier attempt to sell the tickets online on a first-come, first-served basis failed when the site set up to handle the sales crashed.

The city has, so far, been unable to tell those who do not get a regional rail papal pass how they should travel into Philadelphia for the pope’s visit, especially since organizers have said cars will not be a viable option. Only about 200 transactions were completed.

As of now, no plans for distributing the three-day surface transit papal visit passes have been announced.

Trains will run on a modified schedule and only be operating from 18 stations. Anyone who makes multiple entries in the lottery may have their entries deleted, for instance. After the lucky entrants are notified, they will have three days to purchase the passes or another entry will be selected, Williams said. Eastbound, El service will end at 30th Street.