Oyster and National Rail

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 »

Yesterday I discovered another little anomaly with the Oyster system.  I ventured out with one of my kids on a circular route taking in the DLR and Overground.  We touched in at Crayford and took the rounder service to Woolwich Arsenal.  Then it was the DLR to Shadwell with the obligatory sitting in the front seat pretending to drive the train. Read the rest of this entry »

The possibility of proving two points in one trip proved too hard to resist today, so once again I ventured out on the trains.  On the way back I exited via the Southern gateline at London Bridge and re-entered via the Southeastern gateline.  This time the system correctly charged me just one journey, so it looks like they have finally sorted out this issue.

A couple of weeks ago I had a surprising email from Transport for London.  It told me that I was due a refund of £4 because of an ‘operational issue’.  It said that the refund was ready to be picked up from London Bridge Underground station.  This was just the start of a whole new discovery.  Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve had a reply to my letter about breaking an OSI by using a bus.  The person answering the letter has not understood what I was trying to say, so I’ve sent back an email reply explaining it in a different way.  At least this letter has been answered, unlike the earlier ones concerning the broken OSI at London Bridge.

And a reply arrives the same day to this followup email.  They do understand what I’m saying, but there is no way to allow a bus to be used in the middle of a rail journey.  At least we now know.

I’ve managed to break the oyster system again!  I’ll admit that this time it was a deliberate attempt to try something out-of-the-ordinary, but not impossible.  I was returning from Balham to Crayford and I changed at New Cross Gate to avoid using zone 1.  It was raining, so rather than walk Read the rest of this entry »

To complete the picture I tried one more time to use the concourse at London Bridge while exiting from Southeastern (P1-6) and entering to Southern (P8-16).  Again I was charged for two journeys.  Whilst I await a response from either ATOC or the Oyster Helpline I have flagged these two OSIs as not working on the list here.

Well, the explanation from ATOC seemed to make sense, but in fact it was incorrect.  Yesterday I made another journey from Crayford to Norwood Junction.  Just for variety I tried travelling via Victoria on the outward journey because engineering works meant that the trains from Dartford were diverted via Sidcup.  It all worked correctly this time, until I came to go home. Read the rest of this entry »

There have been some more developments with the double journey I made at the beginning of the month.  I wrote to the fares correspondant at Rail Magazine, Barry Doe, and he managed to get a reply from a contact at the association of train operating companies.  To cut a long and complicated story short, I made the mistake of following out-dated signage at London Bridge and confused the system. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve just checked my journey history and noticed that Tuesday night’s journey to Norwood Junction has been charged as two separate journeys, one from Crayford to London Bridge and the other from London Bridge to Norwood Junction.  Surely that can’t be right?  True, I could have used the footbridge to change platforms, but I was hungry Read the rest of this entry »