In a day over two months time the OEP will be no more, but this is not stopping South Eastern from making a fast buck. They are blatantly targeting people who are about to have the correct fare for their journey deducted from the PAYG balance on their card. And these are people with travelcards stored on their Oyster card, often expensive annual ones. The phrase “biting the hand that feeds you” springs to mind here.
General News
OEPs to be scrapped
Following a summit at City Hall with the Mayor, TfL and the London TOCs a number of improvements to travel within London have been announced. The best one is that the Oyster Extension Permit will be killed off from 22nd May 2011, just over 16 months since it’s introduction. Other measures include
London Orbital Railway Complete
Just for a change I thought I’d write about some general rail news. This week saw the opening of the missing link in the London Orbital Railway. Note, this isn’t the one that TfL will want you to know about because this one isn’t entirely coloured orange. We’ll have to wait until the end of next year for that version. However, in the meantime
Get new card with £3 deposit
As part of the fares revision last month, TfL increased the deposit on new Oyster cards from £3 to £5. This is what you’ll pay online, at Oyster ticket stops and at station ticket offices. The deposit is refundable of course, but only when you surrender the card. However, at many underground stations there are … Read more
Changes for 2011
Over the last few weeks details of several changes to the Oyster charging structure have been announced. The biggest changes are obviously the actual fares and you can now see what effect the review will have on your fare on the single fare finder on the TfL website. Some of the other changes are summarised below:
New OSIs (inc Bank-Cannon St)
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.
New Pink Validator at Woolwich
Earlier today I travelled to the Excell Centre via Woolwich Arsenal and was surprised to see a pink route validator has appeared on platform 2 (Southeastern towards Dartford) where the access to the DLR platforms is. I touched on it in both directions and it certainly seems to be working. It was surprising because
OEP should really be OTEP
I’ve decided that TfL have got the name of the OEP wrong. It should actually be called the Oyster Travelcard Extension Permit (or OTEP). This would avoid the first confusion where people think it extends the oyster system so that they can travel beyond oysterisation into the home counties. It still won’t help with the … Read more
New Pages for Trams and Wimbledon
I recently needed to visit Wimbledon and decided to use the tram to Croydon in one direction for a bit of variety. I was struck by how poor the instructions for touching in and out were, especially when interchanging between train or tube and tram. It seems like they have forgotten to update the instructions … Read more
Oyster online website shut
The Oyster online section of the TfL website has been shut since Friday evening for important maintenance. The closure was publicised beforehand, although it didn’t say it would happen before midnight Friday. While the maintenance is fair enough, what has annoyed me is that all the information pages about Oyster have also been taken offline. … Read more