Oyster and National Rail

January 2nd 2010 was the day that Oyster became accepted on almost all National Rail services in Greater London, making cashless pay-as-you-go a reality London-wide.  It should now be really simple, but in reality it is about as complicated as it could possibly be. There are three different fares structures depending on whether your route accepted Oyster before November 2009 or not, and if not whether your journey mixes National Rail and TfL rail and includes zone 1; while children sometimes travel free and sometimes have to pay.

This site has been set up to try and explain how the system works in an alternative fashion to the official TfL site.  It also exposes the alternative approach that families can take where Oyster is not the cheapest option. Plus I will highlight areas where the system is not working and list improvements that I feel need to be made.

The pages listed in the left sidebar allow you to navigate through the main information areas of the site.  Below this introduction is a latest news blog, which includes my own personal diary of experiences using Oyster cards with my family.  Please feel free to add comments to both blog posts and pages, especially if you spot something you think might be wrong.

Thanks to regular visitor Phil who spotted that the normal Monday distribution of weekly journey statements had not run this week.  According to the helpdesk there was a problem which meant Oyster online was unavailable for some of Monday.  It appears that this included the time when the statements are generated. Hopefully they will now arrange to re-run the job.

With a heavy heart I have decided to add a captcha test on registrations and comments on this site.  The number of spam comments received each day had risen dramatically over the last few months although they were being properly detected by the Akismet plugin.  Unfortunately the last few days has seen a meteoric rise in the number of registrations and pretty much all of them were created by automatic bots.

So, from today users will have to complete part of a simple maths sum before either registering or commenting.  I have tried to avoid the awful blurred and distorted words which are sometimes just as impossible for humans to read as they are for computers.  In the future I may relax the moderation rules so that others can see questions as soon as they are posted rather than waiting for me to approve them.  I also hope to continue integrating the forum as a more appropriate place to discuss issues.

TfL have just uploaded three videos to YouTube about being Oyster Smart.  I’ve got to say they are quite succinct in explaining the basics and well worth a watch.  Here they are:

• On the move with Oyster
• Managing your Oyster card with an online account
• Paying for your travel

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TfL have made a bit of a boob when switching between the 2012 and 2013 fares.  The old link with “current” in the address still points at the 2012 fares.  What’s worse is that if you search for “single fares” on the TfL home page, the first result takes you to the 2012 fare finder.  Ooops!

For the right data you either need to click on “Tickets” then choose under the “Fares” heading, or use this address instead.

I’ve been informed by a site visitor that changes are on the way for people who travel between the Morden end of the Northern line and stations east of Clapham High Street on the Overground extension.  He enlisted the help of his London Assembly member and received the following response:

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On Saturday I went out with one of my kids to try and check out the maximum journey time bug on Whitechapel to Balham NR.  While trying to avoid both cards getting two incomplete journeys I actually managed to replicate the touch out followed by touch in at an OSI gateline continues the journey problem.  Oh dear!

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On Sunday I travelled round the new overground orbital route starting with the newest link from Surrey Quays to Clapham Junction.  I also tried out exceeding the normal one zone journey time but not the extended time allowed near Central London.  Somewhat disappointingly this worked, meaning that the issues some people have had with Whitechapel to Balham might be restricted to certain routes only.

However, while at Willesden Junction I noticed an important change to the signage on the pink route validators.  Rather than just inviting PAYG users to touch them, the notice now instructs those with a travelcard not including zone 1 to do so as well.  I think this probably means an end to the loopholes where you could travel across zone 1 on some journeys with a travelcard ending at zone 2 and not be charged a zone 1 fare.  It’s a shame, though I can’t fault the justification for doing it as long as queues don’t build up at key interchange points.

Over the next few weeks many of the pages on the site will receive significant updates to reflect the changes to the system, especially the difference between the daily caps and paper travelcards.  In many cases the existing page will be archived so that both versions are available.

I’ve just had an email from TfL informing me that the trigger for auto top-up is increasing to £10 from January 2013.  This is not entirely surprising given that there will be more fares above the £8 level with the expansion of PAYG to Shenfield and Broxbourne.

I’ve just been alerted to the new fares scales for Oyster from January 2013.  The big news is that while paper day travelcard prices are increased, the comparable Oyster caps are frozen at 2012 levels.  This is to encourage more people to make the switch from paper to Oyster.

I’ll post more details once I’ve had a chance to digest the information.