Ok, so the train company has taken the piss on everyone relying on the cap or buying Travelcards from Epsom.
To be fair to GTR, they never wanted Epsom to be in zone 9, but the DfT insisted that Epsom be added to Oyster and there were only two ways of doing that; zone 9 with cheaper day caps than desired, or zone 10 and don’t recommend people rely on capping because they couldn’t adjust it all. I think TfL should take a little blame here that their page on the station stated that it was in zone 9. That was probably an unforseen consequence of the way those pages are generated, but it certainly didn’t help the situation.
And now suddenly they have removed the validity of zone 1-9 Travelcard there and can now penalty fare anyone who use his usual ticket to commute to, or through, Epsom, without making any public announcement that the station is rezoned.
The likelihood is that commuters will have been using Epsom to zone 1-6 period travelcards because they were significantly cheaper than the zone 1-9 variety.
Don’t get me wrong, GTR’s refusal to publicise when changes are made is not a good look. They did it before when they got TfL to change how extension fares worked on contactless for Gatwick Airport, and now they’ve done it again. What we have now is almost what was supposed to be put in place in the beginning, so it’s not going to be reversed.