Oyster and National Rail

I noticed yesterday that the times reported on the journey history screen are all out by an hour since the clocks went forward last Sunday.  The times shown are a further hour ahead so it looks like something is compensating for summer time when it doesn’t need to.  The Oyster system clock is correct so you do get charged the right peak or off-peak fares.

Several visitors have reported problems when touching out and back in again at the same station.  The system tries to combine the two journeys into one, often resulting in a pair of incomplete journeys when you get back to your starting station.  But if your journey included an OSI en-route then you may well end up out of the system altogether and be given a penalty fare!

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I have received a new list of OSIs which is dated January 2012.  Not much has changed, but there are new OSIs between Aldgate and Tower Gateway, the two Edgware Road stations and different gatelines at Farringdon and Oxford Circus.  The temporary ones between Blackfriars NR and alternate District line stations are still active at the moment, though how long that will remain is unclear.

The next stage of the journey history modifications has just gone live.  The old, very difficult to understand, version has been discontinued in favour of an option to expand details for every journey.  You no longer need to have bought online credit to access journey history and you can also see touches on pink validators and journeys covered by your travelcard.  It even shows you when a journey is part travelcard and part pay-as-you-go.  There are also buttons to produce a printer-friendly version and a CSV format file to load into spreadsheets.  Unfortunately these additional formats do not seem to include the charging detail, but hopefully this can be added in a future release.

They are still collecting feedback and actively responding to it.  There are even some features which are already earmarked for a future version, including more detail about how the charges are calculated, ability to sort and/or filter journeys, download to a PDF file and request a statement via email – presumably instantaneous rather than the current 2-3 day delay.

Perhaps the most useful addition is left to a single line at the bottom of the future improvements list.  It says “Option to request adjustments to some pay as you go charges”.  If this reduces the need to call the helpdesk to resolve issues then it will be a very worthwhile addition.  I’ll be watching this one very closely.

The journey history page on this site will be updated shortly once I’ve had a chance to grab screen prints.