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.

I thought it was time for another snippet from my own Oyster travels.  Today I had to get into Farringdon for a meeting.  With no services there or at Barbican I decided to use the bus from Southwark Jubilee line station.  This meant that I had to exit Waterloo East via the Southwark connection and walk straight through the Underground station without travelling.  There is a special setting Read the rest of this entry »

I have added a new section in the left sidebar called Latest Comments.  This gives a snippet of the last eight comments (not posted by me) from anywhere on the site.  I have ignored my comments as they are usually responses to questions raised and thus best read with the previous comment.

Further to the earlier post I am now able to comment further about the new journey history, and include a screenprint so that others who might not have any recent history can still comment.  Oysteronline is very keen to recieve feedback on this project, good or bad.  What we are currently seeing is the first beta version which was released at the beginning of August.  There is an update due next month which will address some of the issues highlighted in feedback so far.  Please keep it coming though, either directly from the Oyster online website, or by replying to this post.

Anyway, onto the screenprint. Read the rest of this entry »

An eagle-eyed visitor has spotted that TfL have introduced a new journey history display recently.  It is much improved on the old version.  You can still only see details for the last eight weeks but the history is broken up into week long chunks.  Within each week the entry and exit details for each journey (or part of a multi-leg journey) are matched up so that you only see the fare for that journey. Read the rest of this entry »

Tom Edwards has reported on his BBC blog that there are some changes in the pipeline to combat maximum fare overcharging. I have to start though by saying that the article title is possibly a bit misleading. I don’t think they are actually planning to replace all the Oyster cards in circulation.

The main thought seems to be that where people make a regular journey using PAYG and occasionally fail to touch out Read the rest of this entry »

In the last week I had to make an unusually high number of evening peak journeys between Crayford and Sidcup, so for the first time I decided to buy a weekly travelcard for zones 5 and 6.  I now have first hand experience of some of the differences that occur when you have a travelcard season loaded on your card.  I’ll be adding stuff to the main site pages in due course, but for now, here is a summary of the best and worst bits: Read the rest of this entry »

It seems that the machines which sell Oyster cards for £5 including £2 PAYG credit have all but been withdrawn.  At London Bridge the machine has an “Out of Use” sticker over the money slot.  I enquired with some contacts who confirmed that they are being withdrawn at the moment.  Almost all central London machines have been removed or taken out of service and they will be gone completely by the end of July.

Oyster users mixing travelcards and pay-as-you-go no longer need to worry about OEPs.  Hurrah!!!

I’ve just received an email from TfL about Oyster. I’m presuming it was sent because my card is registered. It’s a real shame that they couldn’t have sent a similar email in December 2009 alerting everyone to the new Oyster Extension Permits. This could have saved so many people from falling victim to those not-very-nice management people at South Eastern who are still imposing penalty fares at their London terminals. I reckon there will be Read the rest of this entry »

The BBC are looking to run a feature about linking National Railcards and Oyster cards on a radio programme next week.  They are looking for people to share their experiences of getting the cards linked (good or bad) and views about the (lack of) publicity telling people that they can do this.  Read the rest of this entry »