Over the last couple of years the Tyne Tunnel has moved from cash to ANPR / online payments. By and large it seems to have worked quite well. There is an official APP where vehicles can be registered in a personal account. My wife and I are only occasional users so I keep a balance of £10.00 in the account and the fee is automatically deducted on use.
Non account users can pay online within 24 hours of the journey.
In the early seventies we had tippers sometimes doing seven or eight loads of stone a day through the tunnel to the new sewage treatment plant at Howden so my Dad would buy batches of prepaid tickets (about 40p each way IIRC) and leave them at the quarry weighbridge. The weighman would give the driver two tickets every time he had a load to go through the tunnel.
Tyneside