Thanks Mike
My old card was one of those briefly issued by London councils around 2004 – in my case Lewisham, and I did use it as my library card for a few years before that functionality was cut back. I’d be interested in the history behind them, but that’s for another time… fair to say when I showed to TfL staff the normal reply was “that’s not an Oyster card!”.
So it had a notional penny deposit on it and that with the rest of the balance and validity appears to have been transferred entirely to the new card – I incurred no additional costs. I can imagine an observant inspector might be surprised to see an Oyster balance ending in 1 or 6, though I guess the actual sum doesn’t appear on a routine check.
On my original query I’m thinking the procedure for claiming must be similar to a forgotten season ticket. I’ll keep a track of my travel costs and hopefully the new card will arrive soon.