Oyster and National Rail

A visitor to this site has highlighted some missing fares between stations on the North London Line and the northern branches of the Northern line.  I have sent the following email Read the rest of this entry »

Now that Tottenham Court Road has re-opened on the Northern line, and interchange is once more possible with the Central line, the temporary OSIs between Goodge Street, Leicester Square and Tottenham Court Road have been removed.

I’ve received the latest list from TfL via a Freedom of Information request.  It confirms my suspiscion that the helpdesk didn’t know what they were saying when they told me that the Finsbury Park OSI was 90 minutes.  As I thought, it is actually 10 minutes, which is quite reasonable for the short distance involved.  There are also two new interchanges Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been informed by a visitor that the new gatelines are active on the NR platforms at Finsbury Park.  This means that it is now important to touch out and in again when interchanging between NR and LU.  There are information posters explaining the new system.  I await confirmation with my latest freedom of information request, but I assume that this is now an out-of-station interchange, probably with 10-15 minutes allowed.

Yes, it’s really happening this time.  According to a response from a freedom of information request, TfL have confirmed that this long ignored out-of-station interchange will be introduced from 22nd May 2011.  You can read the full Read the rest of this entry »

Other travel during the day had almost applied an off-peak cap to my card so I took the opportunity to investigate reports of problems, both current and future, at Finsbury Park.  Before I outline the full story though, the important message here is that at the moment you do NOT need to touch out or in if interchanging between Underground and National Rail.  In fact, if you try to touch out you will hit serious problems.

As usual I started my journey at Crayford.  Read the rest of this entry »

I have just been made aware about an update to the OSI list dating back to last November. There is one new OSI between Cannon Street NR and Mansion House LU. Sadly there still isn’t an OSI between Cannon Street and Bank which is a much more popular route. The one they’ve added is only really useful on Saturdays.

In late October I was provided with a new list of OSIs which had come from the ATOC fare manual rather than my usual source at TfL.  It looked like there were some useful new OSIs, including the long awaited Bank to Cannon Street interchange.  Later I received my usual update from TfL which showed that the ATOC list was rather inaccurate with most of it’s changes.  Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve recently become aware of an issue at some National Rail stations, e.g. Stratford, Barking.  These are stations where people will often arrive from outside the Oyster area on a paper ticket and wish to continue using their Oystercard without visiting the gateline.  These stations sometimes have yellow standalone readers which record either entry or exit, often with a sign telling PAYG users to touch in here.  You might not want to do this. Read the rest of this entry »

I picked up this little gem on another website this week.  If you have over run the maximum journey time by just a few minutes and you are at an out of station interchange then there might be a way out of the incomplete journey penalty.  Thanks to Phil for allowing me to share his story: Read the rest of this entry »