Hi Joana,
They’re not silly questions, there was a lot to get in and I wasn’t sure if I’d made it clear enough.
To explain the Oyster a bit more. Yes, all Oyster journeys are single like you’ve been doing on the tube. You touch in at the start of the journey and out at the end. Oyster also has this clever feature where it will join together journey legs where you have to leave one station and walk to another nearby. So for Hendon to Southfields you touch in at Hendon, touch out at West Hampstead Thameslink, walk to West Hampstead Overground and touch in again, touch the pink reader within West Brompton to say you’ve avoided zone 1 and touch out at Southfields. Providing you don’t take longer than 20 minutes between touching out and back in again at West Hampstead it will join the two journeys together and charge the fares I said for the whole journey from Hendon to Southfields. There is a map here showing West Hampstead and how close all the stations are.
Now, normally you would find that buying two tickets is more expensive, as indeed you see with St Albans to Hendon and Hendon to West Hampstead versus St Albans to West Hampstead. The reason it works here is that on Oyster you only pay for the zones you travel through once, so Hendon to Southfields is zone 3-2-1-2-3 (or 3-2-3 if you avoid zone 1). This isn’t always true for paper tickets from outside the zones (eg St Albans). Also, as I said earlier, Hendon is on the boundary between zones 3 and 4, so your paper ticket ends in zone 4 and you start using Oyster in zone 3.
Where your first journey is in the morning peak I’ve quoted the undiscounted peak fare and assuming you start travelling back before 1600 you’ll get the off-peak discounted fare for the way home. So you don’t have to double anything unless I’ve done it by saying x2.
So your weekly total IF you always AVOID zone 1 should look like this:
Afternoon in Wembley Park: 2x £10.60 = £21.20
Morning in Southfields: 2x £18.30 = £36.60
All day in both places: 1x £19.55
Saturday in Southfields: 1x £9.80
TOTAL £77.35 (M-F) or £87.15 (inc Sat)
Now, I do have to make a small confession. If you want to go via Blackfriars there is a different ticket you can buy which I’d forgotten about. It’s St Albans to “ZONE U123* LONDN” which costs £22.00 with your railcard. It allows you to travel fast into London and then make 1 return journey on the Underground in zones 1-3. It’s a bit cheaper because you don’t end up paying full single fares on Oyster in the morning. There is an avoiding zone 1 option to “ZONE U23* LONDN” but that costs £20.00 which you can beat with Oyster. There also isn’t a super off-peak version of this ticket, so Saturdays is better off with Oyster. For the long day the fact you’d still have to pay to get from Southfields to Wembley Park and the bus makes it more expensive than using Oyster.
I realise there is a hell of a lot to consider here, and maybe some of the Southfields days you’d prefer the fast train to London and only one ticket, even though it costs a bit more. Hopefully the Wembley Park days will be a big saving using the bus.
