Oyster and National Rail

Last Thursday, 29th August, PAYG was extended to Radlett, Potters Bar and Brookmans Park.  Both Oyster and contactless are accepted at the first two, while Brookmans Park is the pilot for a new breed of stations accepting contactless only.  The official launch took place at Radlett in the morning with the local MP, the new transport secretary and other GTR senior staff.  More detail about fares follows, but first some quotes on the day:

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Yesterday GTR launched new PAYG stations at Radlett, Potters Bar and Brookmans Park.  While the first two accept both contactless and Oyster PAYG, Brookmans Park is the first contactless only station.  It was clearly necessary for my fare finder to indicate this for any journey to/from Brookmans Park, so some coding changes were rapidly required.  Sadly the multi-type fare finder has had to be taken out of use at the moment, but the newer version (yellow button at the top of the page) has been updated.  You can also use this directly on a mobile device at https://oysterfares.com/off/.

The zonal coverage and cap information for the new Oyster stations isn’t live yet because I haven’t received the data from TfL.  I’m also waiting for precise information about what capping, if any, will be applied if one journey involves Brookmans Park.  There are a number of potential scenarios, but the statement by both GTR and TfL that capping does not apply from Brookmans Park doesn’t give any clues away.

We’ve all heard the annoying announcements at tube stations. Why not use contactless? The fares are the same as Oyster and there’s no need to top up. In fact, as described elsewhere on this site, contactless can often be cheaper than Oyster thanks to the way it compares all combinations of caps and extension fares. However, TfL have unwittingly introduced an issue which means that sometimes contactless may cost more than Oyster.

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There’s been a bit of excitement since the publication under FOI of an internal staff magazine by TfL. One of the topics covered was upcoming extensions on Thameslink and Great Northern. Sadly the original publication date was quite a while ago (early May) and there was also a shocking geographical error mixing up the positions of Brookmans Park and Potters Bar stations. The article and other sources suggested that extensions to Radlett and Potters Bar would be live imminently. A more cautious approach was being suggested on the Thameslink and Great Northern websites, so I sought clarification from both TfL and Govia Thameslink Railway.
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I’m delighted to be able to report that the issues at St Pancras over the two bank holiday weekends in May are being resolved.  A GTR spokeswoman said:

We apologise to the passengers impacted by this charging error. As soon as we were alerted to the isolated issue our revenue team worked with the technical team at TfL to ensure that everyone who was overcharged would be refunded automatically. These refunds should all be issued early next week. A permanent fix will be applied as soon as possible. In the meantime, we have agreed a process to avoid any impact to customers.

Potentially hundreds of Thameslink passengers may have been overcharged over the two bank holiday weekends in May.  On both weekends the line between West Hampstead Thameslink and St Pancras (low level) was closed for engineering work.  Trains from Bedford/Luton terminated in platforms 1-4 at St Pancras (high level) and passengers wanting to continue south had to walk down to the low level platforms (A-B).  The problem is that there was no internal out-of-station interchange (OSI) set up between the Oyster validators for platforms 1-4 and the gateline for platforms A-B.  Thus a journey from Elstree to Blackfriars was charged as two journeys; Elstree to St Pancras and St Pancras to Blackfriars.

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Thanks to a keen visitor I can confirm that in certain circumstances a pair of full adult peak singles is more expensive than the paper anytime return.  The journey must be in a single zone (2, 3, 4, 5 or 6), be priced on the NR1 fare scale (see guide to fare scales) and both directions must be made at peak times (0630-0930 or 1600-1900).  There are some quite reasonable length journeys, especially in zones 2 and 6, like Caterham to Purley or Lewisham to Clapham Junction via Denmark Hill.  The peak Oyster single is £2.30 making £4.60 for a return while the paper return ticket is £4.40. Read the rest of this entry »

Monday 3rd June saw the opening of London’s newest station, Meridian Water.  It replaces the old Angel Road which has already seen quite a lot of demolition work since the last trains called there on Friday 31st May.  For the time being the service will be the same as that at Angel Road, but later this year a new shuttle service between Stratford and Meridian Water will start, providing an all day service, rather than the current peak hours only.

TfL’s single fare finder now includes Meridian Water which means that my fare finder can also show the fares.  As my station list is a simplified one (cutting out duplicates where two modes serve the same station) I have now removed the entry for Angel Road.

While travelling around London last weekend I came across this poster detailing the results of some targetted enforcement earlier in the year.  It’s a timely reminder that both TfL and the TOCs take revenue loss (fare evasion) very seriously. Read the rest of this entry »

TfL have very kindly provided updated data showing how many journeys made use of each OSI in the system. The data was recorded over a four week period in April/May 2019. The top 3 remain the NR to LU interchanges at South London termini, though London Bridge has overtaken Victoria.  The accessible route OSI at Woodford has now started being regularly used while no-one now walks between Hackney Downs and Central other than by the  footbridge linking the two stations. The slightly lower figures for many entries is probably down to the fact that there were 3 bank holidays in the period.

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