Experiences

Hi Mike,

They say that life is all about experiences so here are a couple I hope everyone finds interesting and informative.

Since we on this site discovered the “z1-6 Day Travelcard on a Greater Anglia Smartcard” it’s been my preferred ticket for exploring TfL-land. I buy the ticket on the app, load it to the smartcard from my phone and go out to enjoy the day. Except yesterday the process didn’t work, failing to transfer the ticket to the smartcard. The error message said it couldn’t read the smartcard though other apps had no trouble reading it so I suspect that what it meant was that it couldn’t load the newly purchased ticket to it.

Luckily my plan for the day meant that I could make a slight diversion to the GA ticket office at Liverpool Street. The very helpful person there said “There’s a problem with the app; be nice if they could put up a message to say so.” I can only agree, and what we’ve learned from that is that loading a ticket to a smartcard isn’t just a transfer from phone to card, as I’d assumed: it requires real-time back-end processing.

I kept trying, and by the time I got to Whitechapel – some four hours after I’d bought the ticket, it loaded to the smartcard and all was well for the rest of the day.

Anyway, back to Oyster. I used that for my journeys as far as Whitechapel and had a really strange experience at Liverpool Street.

I arrived on the Central line and used that gateline to go up to the NR concourse and the GA ticket office. Twenty minutes later I tried to enter at the SSR gateline but my Oyster wouldn’t open the gate, showing the red light (I never remember to look at the reject code even though I carry the list of codes on my phone). I tried a few other gates with the same result then went to a POM which showed that the maximum fare had been deducted even though the gate hadn’t opened. I found a gateline assistant – with some difficulty – and he showed me error 21 (Double entry attempted) then let me through.

So the problem here was that the first gate I’d used had succesfully updated the Oyster card but had shown the red light and hadn’t opened the gate. Interestingly, every attempted entry is shown in TfL’s app.

You may recall a similar but opposite problem I had some time back where the gate had opened but the card and back office systems weren’t updated, resulting in a maximum fare which took a phone call to resolve and even then not satisfactorily.

Clearly, smart ticketing has a long way to go before it’s a reliable method of paying for train travel. I hope these experiences help others to be aware of problems and solutions.