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Sorry for a long post, but here’s a follow-up.
I never did contact either TfL or GA (I knew I wouldn’t bother) but that wasn’t the end of this saga.
As I mentioned, I used my Oyster for the bits where the ITSO card appeared to be not working: the Oyster history was:
Thursday, 13 March 2025 £3.95 daily total
15:22 – 15:31 Heathrow 5 [LU] to Hatton Cross £0.00 £16.90
15:31 Touch out, Hatton Cross +£4.65 £16.90
15:22 Touch in, Heathrow 5 [LU] £4.65 £12.2514:59 – 15:13 Heathrow 2 & 3 [LU] to Heathrow 5 [LU] £0.00 £16.90
15:13 Touch out, Heathrow 5 [LU] +£4.65 £16.90
14:59 Touch in, Heathrow 2 & 3 [LU] £4.65 £12.2513:38 – ????
Amersham to [Unspecified location] £1.35 £16.90
13:38 Touch in, Amersham £4.65 £13.6013:21 – 13:35 Chorleywood to Amersham £1.35 £18.25
13:35 Touch out, Amersham +£3.30 £18.25
13:21 Touch in, Chorleywood £4.65 £14.9513:17 Topped up, Chorleywood +£10.00 £19.60
12:28 – 13:11 Rickmansworth to Chorleywood £1.25 £9.60
13:11 Touch out, Chorleywood +£3.40 £9.60
12:28 Touch in, Rickmansworth £4.65 £6.20Starting balance £10.85
The [Unspecified location] was Rickmansworth at 13:55. This seems to be one of those occasions where Oyster opened the gate and recorded the event on the card (I checked on a POM later) but the transaction didn’t make it to the back office. For several days, that journey showed in TfL Go as a pending transaction of £2.80, even though the balance was correctly shown for the charge of £1.35. Many days later, the exit at Ricky did appear correctly in TfL Go and online so I thought no more about it.
The next time I used my Oyster, a refund of £3.30 was applied to it. Whilst I’m pleased that most of my costs incurred as a result of TfL’s messing about with my ITSO card have been refunded, I couldn’t at first understand why I’d received this refund. I now do, but I shouldn’t have the refund (no, I’m not giving it back: I’m keeping it as compensation for the hassle).
I asked myself three questions:
How could it be known that the correct charge was £1.35 if the system didn’t know where I’d exited? [Answer: the back office didn’t know but the Oyster card did.]
Why was the pending charge £2.80? Surely the initial deduction at Amersham at off-peak with a senior railcard should be £4.65, which is indeed shown in the history above.
What has caused the refund, and why is it £3.30? In drafting this, I think I’ve answered this question: £3.30 is the difference between the correct maximum fare of £4.65 and the actual fare of £1.35 for an Amersham to Rickmansworth off-peak with a senior railcard discount.
So, although the Oyster card correctly recorded and charged all journeys, the back office was very confused. It lost the exit at Ricky for about a week before finding it. It then applied a refund of the difference between the maximum and actual charge for that journey, even though I had already been correctly charged.
The question of why the pending charge in TfL Go was £2.80 instead of £4.65 remains unanswered.
This is one reason why I will always prefer Oyster over contactless: I have much more control and visibility with Oyster, whereas the back office seems to have many problems. I’m not a frequent user of TfL’s technology, but if the number of issues I have with it is representative then it really has problems.
I wonder if the full history is held by ITSO (the organisation) and/or GA (in my case). I might see what a subject access request gives me…
I’m fortunate that I can afford to value my time and sanity over the few quid extra I spent. Dealing with customer service – in any organisation – is usually a time-consuming, stressful, and often unproductive experience so I avoid it when I can, even more so when the issue is complex and I’m unsure of my justification.
I’ve looked at the issue in more detail and I’m puzzled why the gate would return error 26 “Entry and Exit at same station” (what does such an “error” mean anyway?). If the system was concerned about my rapid exit/entry/exit/attempted entry then error 41 “Pass back through / Zig-Zag: Attempt to Enter after an Entry and Exit at the same station…” would seem to be more accurate and appropriate.
Whichever, there must also be a timeout and this backs up your theory that even though the POM at Ricky still showed “void”, presenting the card at the gate may well have cleared the problem. The fact that the ITSO card stores only the most recent journey also means that it can only test for passback at that station and would work properly elsewhere.
Looking at the ITSO specification documents and my card, no passback rules seem to be defined in the ticket (i.e. the travelcard as stored on the card). In this case, passback rules are as defined by the POST (Point of Service Terminal), i.e by TfL. It therefore seems likely that the same rules apply to ITSO as to Oyster/contactless/paper. If so, at least that gives us some times to work with. If I’d waited at T2/3 for 30 minutes the ITSO might have worked again.
Sorry, Mike, I guess this is a little off-topic for your site; I will let you know if I hear anything useful, though.
It was certainly an interesting experience; you can always trust me to stress-test a ticketing function 🙂
I don’t recall trying the ITSO on the gates at Ricky: I tried the POM and as it still showed void I gave up and resigned myself to a discussion with GA about a replacement card.
For that reason, I don’t think I can ask TfL for a refund as I chose not to use the ticket I already had. It was only a few quid anyway.
Also for that reason, I can’t answer your interesting question about whether the block applied only at T2/3 and would have cleared had I tried the card on a gate elsewhere.
One thing that backs up that that might be true is that the POM at T4, after the card had been unblocked by the gate at Hatton Cross, showed incomplete details of the last journey (i.e. from HC to T4). Usually the place/date/time of both touches would be shown but it had only the place. The full place/date/time was shown for T4. This suggests to me, and I think you’re suggesting the same, that the gate at HC unblocked the card in a way which resulted in incomplete details being recorded. As no-one will ever tell us, we can only speculate.
Before contacting GA – though I hope I don’t have to – I need to test the ITSO to make sure it’s still working properly. I’ll pop up to London sometime this week and make some more normal journeys.
One of the benefits of Oyster is that every touch (at least until TfL broke it in TfL Go) is visible. An ITSO seems to hold only the last journey. Do you know if the full history is available from an ITSO?
And I’d change at T2/3 rather than continuing to T4. The EL gets to T2/3 before T4, the walking distance between the NR/LU stations at each is about the same, and there are more Pic trains from T2/3 to Hatton Cross because they come fom both T4 & T5.
And if you decide to change at West Hampstead, as you exit the Overground station there’s a pedestrian crossing just to the left. Cross the road there as the Jubilee line station is on the other side of the road and there’s nowhere safe to cross further down. You can actually see each station from the other, whereas Brondesbury/Kilburn are a bit further to walk.
Thanks, Mike. Not to labour the point but today I found myself in west London with a travelcard and some time to spare so I took the journey myself to see how reality matched up to the theory.
I only had time to take the journey once in each direction: Wembley Park to Kew Gardens via Kilburn and Brondesbury took 34m45s; Kew Gardens to Wembley Park via West Hampstead took 38m13s.
Approaching Wembley Park we did have to wait for a terminating train to clear the platform so I think the northbound trip was about a minute longer than it should be. Apart from that I had good journeys both ways.
I’m sure that Stephen now has more information that he wanted or needed but hopefully some of it is useful 🙂
Hi, Mike. Because one saves the time the two trains take to get to/from West Hampstead.
Kew Gardens – Brondesbury = 22mins
Walk Brondesbury – Kilburn – 2mins
Kilburn – Wembley Park = 8mins
Total 32mins plus waiting timeKew Gardens – West Hampstead = 23mins
Walk West Hampstead LO – West Hampstead LU = 1min
West Hampstead LU – Wembley Park = 10mins
Total 34mins plus waiting timeSo one’s likely to be one Jubilee line train ahead. Of course, it may make no difference at all which is probably why journey planners suggest both routes roughly equally.
If I were doing that journey I’d almost certainly go via Kilburn/Brondesbury.
I should add that the quickest way between Kew Gardens and Wembley Park is probably LO to Brondesbury, walk 200m to Kilburn for the Jubilee to Wembley. Yes, there’s an OSI between Brondesbury and Kilburn (20 mins).
West Hampstead is three (LU, LO, & Thameslink) separate stations, up to 200m apart, joined by a busy road. There are OSIs between all of them so you’ll only pay for one journey providing you touch in/out at the gateline at each station.
Yes, they did. I passed it on to Mike who then included it in his fare finder which gives a convenient way of looking up the MJT for specific journeys.
If you’d like the raw CSV then I can email it to you but I’m not available much over the next week or so and then there’ll be the question of how to exchange addresses.
Mike: are you able to help?
Mike points out that, except from Hoxton, any journey to Shoreditch must go through z2 hence the uplift.
Well, it’s taken eight months and an appeal to the Information Commissioner but TfL has now published the MJTs from every station to every other station as I requested. No doubt it will soon appear at https://tfl.gov.uk/corporate/transparency/freedom-of-information
I’ve not had time to analyse it yet but a quick glance suggests that the data was worth the effort as https://tfl.gov.uk/fares/how-to-pay-and-where-to-buy-tickets-and-oyster/pay-as-you-go/keep-within-maximum-journey-times certainly doesn’t tell the whole story. For example, a journey entirely within z1 should be 90mins but Barbican to Shoreditch HS is 100mins (all Shoreditch’s seem to be uplifted by 10mins, reflecting that it’s only in z1 for charging).
I now have a lot of work to do to convert it to a format which is useful for me, especially when out and about. I suggested to TfL that the MJT be included on the Single Fare Finder; I’ll repeat that request when I reply. However, as I’d be surprised if that happened maybe it’s something Mike could add to his fare finder. Mike, if you’d like me to mail it to you just ask. The CSV is 450,000 lines and 23Mb though it compresses to 4Mb.
I can see we’ll have to agree to disagree 🙂
Oxford Circus to Bond Street is 500m – 5 minutes – along Oxford Street, yet the OSI is a massive 20 minutes. That’s easily enough time to arrive, do some shopping, enter at the other station, and return home. That’s exactly – perhaps aside from the shopping – what Martin Phillp did: his journey was a return to Oxford Street from Forest Hill. That’s clearly at least two journeys yet TfL thinks it should be one. It’s nonsense.
As you can tell, I have an aversion to OSIs in general, and poorly implemented ones like these two make things worse. A journey should start at touch in and end at touch out; the next touch in is a new journey. OSIs, especially when combined with MJTs, serve only to complicate.
This is why I always use Travelcards: all these problems don’t exist.
Yes, I’ve been caught out by those annoying OSIs at Oxford Circus and Bond Street. See the comments on 21 Dec 2022 near the bottom of https://oysterfares.com/information-pages/maximum-journey-times/#comment-17161
In my case it didn’t cost me anything as I was fortuitously just inside the MJT. In your case, I’d either correct it online if you can or phone TfL.
Someone should also complain about these daft OSIs. As I said, I doubt that anyone, even those of us who have a decent understanding of the system, would expect there to be an OSI between adjacent stations on the same line.
One wonders how much TfL is making on these two from customers who don’t pay attention to their spending.
I thought I should update the forum on where I am with TfL on the subject of MJTs.
I asked TfL, via their contact form and subsequent emails, to explain the MJTs further than that given at https://tfl.gov.uk/fares/how-to-pay-and-where-to-buy-tickets-and-oyster/pay-as-you-go/keep-within-maximum-journey-times as I consider that, although the basic premise seems clear, some sections are certainly not.
I received four replies from TfL customer service: two of them thought I was requesting a refund and couldn’t help because my contactless payment card wasn’t registered, neither of which I’d mentioned; one merely referred me to the link above which I’d quoted to them in my request; and the fourth pointed me to the journey planner and single fares guide. Clearly, TFL customer service wasn’t going to help.
So I submitted a FOI request asking for the MJT from every station to every other station or, if that was too onerous, for certain sample journeys which would explain the unclear sections of the web page.
The first response was simply, once again, to point me at the MJT web page which I’d already said was lacking clarity. So I repeated the request.
The second FOI response was, at last, complete, considered, and helpful but declined to provide the information, exercising the commercial confidentiality exemption. The full response can be seen at https://tfl.gov.uk/corporate/transparency/freedom-of-information/foi-request-detail?referenceId=FOI-2537-2324
A worrying aspect of the response – beyond the refusal to supply the information – is that TfL describe their MJT web page as “indicative” and “a rough guide”. In other words, one can’t even be sure that the information given there is accurate and complete.
I must now consider how to proceed. There are three things which concern me about TfL’s stance on the request. Firstly, TfL is imposing a condition on travel without fully explaining to the customer what that condition is for the circumstance of the particular journey being undertaken. Secondly, TfL has concluded that the public interest test of the exemption falls in TfL’s favour. I don’t agree: I believe that the public interest lies in the public being informed about the conditions of their travel. Thirdly, given TfL’s involvement in the rollout of contactless PAYG travel to the south-east and possibly the whole country, I think it’s important that the flaws in TfL’s system (MJT, OSI – also unpublished except by FOI, and errors at gatelines) are not propagated to the national system.
The best thing that can be said at the moment is that the continuance of the One Day Travelcard means that the need to understand MJTs is less than it would have been had the Travelcard been withdrawn.
Thanks for the quick response, Mike. There’s also the fact that buses don’t have different peak/off-peak fares.
I can always use Oyster if I find myself boarding a bus before 09:30. At an extra cost of course, but if the next bus is some time away then it may be worth it.
Travelcards are much simpler and more flexible than Oyster/CPC caps. For example:
– you don’t have to keep track of touches so you can check you’ve been charged correctly
– you don’t have to worry about the time* you touch in or the multiple caps you might or might not reach
– you don’t have to touch in/out (except to open gates and on buses)
– you aren’t subject to maximum journey times
– in the event of disruption, you can work round it any way you like without extra charge
– Off-peak Day Travelcards don’t have evening peaksTravelcards are wonderful and their convenience is well worth the small extra cost.
* Except with an off-peak travelcard obviously.
Thanks, Jonathan. I don’t think there’s a PM function on here but there is on the other forum so feel free to contact me from there.
Hi Jonathan,
I received your post during a very nice reverse at Epping while on my own challenge, helping to knock half an hour off my personal best. I’ll comment on the other forum so just a short “congratulations” here with thanks to Mike for permitting this off-topic component.
Back to the fares, yes, nice and easy with a travelcard on a smartcard. I use it for almost all my trips to London, challenge or otherwise. One small point: you don’t have to use any particular stations as the start and end, or even visit those stations. So long as you receive a z1-6 travelcard that’s all that’s required.
The consensus (TfL being the sole dissenter) is that the z1-9 travelcard-on-a-smartcard is valid as described but if it doesn’t work the gates then it’s not useful for any purpose, never mind a challenge where speed is important. It’s all very well Chiltern saying “find a member of staff” but they’re pretty thin on the ground and in any case as they’re employed by TfL they may dispute the ticket’s validity.
As for the future, the best suggestion I can come up with is much more expensive but it’s one I used before we discovered travelcards-on-a-smartcard. I have an Oyster so I put a z1-7* 7-day travelcard on that for one challenge attempt a while back. I was able to use it a couple of days either side of the challenge so it wasn’t too bad for me. It’s a question of convenience and reliability over cost.
* The z1-7 rather than z1-6 was at Mike’s suggestion because otherwise the Watford branch could be an issue if there wasn’t time to touch out/in there.
Thanks, Mike.
I must say the more I look at MJTs the less I see the logic behind some of TfL’s numbers.
It seems like the longer the journey is, the less time you’re allowed to complete it, particularly when taken as a proportion of the likely real journey time.. And you get longer in z1 where trains are frequent and options varied, than in z5 etc where services are less frequent and usually on a single line.
I thought I’d understood things but then I came across diamondgeezer’s post on the subject from a few years back (https://diamondgeezer.blogspot.com/2018/07/maximum-journey-time.html). He says ” If your journey’s only in Zone 3 you’re allowed 70 minutes.” That’s not my interpretation: I think this is covered by “Travelling within Zones 1-4… In Zones 1-3” [TfL] and therefore is 110 minutes, as is a journey wholly within z4. Am I wrong?
[I know this is all rather esoteric and in practice mainly affects a few enthusiasts but, my, how did we get such a complex and illogical system? Long live Travelcards :-)]
Speaking as a real-life, recently successful, tube challenger :-), the answer is to use Oyster/contactless for the z7-9 bits and the GA smart/travelcard for the rest.
This is perfect if ending at Amersham/Chesham because there’s plenty of time to touch in and out. If starting at Amersham/Chesham then continue on Oyster/contactless to the first intended exit point within z1-6, typically North Harrow or Northwick Park. Costs a little more that way, but much cheaper than a weekly TC on Oyster/smartcard (which I’ve also used for the challenge).
In either case, just be aware of and keep an eye on, maximum jouney times; though a maximum fare would still be less than a weekly travelcard.
It seems I was wrong: GA weren’t ignoring me as I’ve just received a reply. Unfortunately it doesn’t say anything more than previously.
GA: It’s valid everywhere in z1-9.
TfL: It’s valid everywhere in z1-6 and some [unspecified] places in z7-9.GA: If it doesn’t work the gates that’s TfL’s problem [true, but unhelpful].
TfL: It doesn’t work the gates at stations where it’s not valid.The one thing I asked GA to do – discuss and resolve the issue with TfL rather than leave the customer stuck in the middle – they clearly haven’t done and have no intention of doing.
This is what happens when you have a fragmented railway and local control. None of the companies care because they can each blame the other, to the detriment of the customer.
I confess to being bored now: I’m happy with the z1-6 element, and I’ll use Oyster for the rest.
Thanks for your input, Mike. Hopefully the more of us who complain to GA the more likely it is that the problem will be resolved. I think they’re ignoring me now.
That said, I agree with your assessment that two travelcards aren’t necessary. I’d go further and suggest that a tube challenger should buy just a z1-6 travelcard and use contactless/Oyster for the zone 7-9 bits. This may also be cheaper than buying a z1-9 anytime travelcard.
In fact, I did just that on a successful challenge a couple of days ago. I bought a GA z1-6 anytime on their smartcard and started at Heathrow T4 with the intention of finishing at Amersham/Chesham. The smartcard worked fine all day and when I arrived at Moor Park on a Chesham train I had plenty of time to trek to the gateline and touch out with the smartcard before in again with Oyster. Had I left North Harrow on a Watford train I’d have switched to Oyster at North Harrow.
Having missed a quick reverse at Watford I then touched out there for a cost of £1.15 (senior railcard). Back in again for a touch out at Amersham 1h26 later, well within the 1h40 MJT allowed at that time of day, for a cost of £1.30.
£21.50 for the Anytime z1-6 travelcard plus £1.15 and £1.30 gives a total for the day of £23.95, £3.25 less than an Anytime z1-9 travelcard. That’s a very good price for visiting 272 stations and travelling who knows how many track miles. Perhaps I’ll calculate the cost per mile…
Even without a railcard the total cost for that particular usage is still £1.90 less than the travelcard. Of course, the exact cost will depend on the chosen route and where and when there’s time to switch to/from Oyster. Even if the z1-9 smartcard problems are sorted I encourage others to consider buying only a z1-6 and contactless/Oyster for the rest.
This has been an interesting and educational discussion. Thanks very much to Jonathan for asking the question and to all those who’ve contributed to the solution.
Good luck to all Tube Challengers.
