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If no zone 1 avoiding fare is listed by the fare finder then one won’t be charged no matter what you do.
The fares listed are the ones that available. If only a single fare is listed between two stations then that’s the one that will always be charged.
It’s a common misunderstanding that the traveller will be charged depending on the zones they actually use. They won’t. They’ll be charged one of the listed fares if their tapping pattern matches the requirements of that fare otherwise they’ll be charged the default fare for the journey.
As to why no fare is listed – that’s on TfL to explain. If I had to guess then I’d suggest that the journey to avoid zone 1 was deemed unreasonably complex for the normal traveller so not worth pricing differently (or used so much rail capacity through all the extra connections etc that it justified the price charged). I’m not wholly serious about the second suggestion, but a case could be made to support it.
Certainly, if such a journey existed in the database, it surely wouldn’t be the one you used as the SWR direct connection from Vauxhall to Clapham Junction is much simpler.
No.
The system is not set up to support mixed ticket type travel.
It’s only the fact that a tap in/out is not required inside the travelcard validity zones that means your outward journey plan is workable. Personally, I think that’s a lucky byproduct of the current implementation rather than a deliberately supported feature.
(I guess I may be doing them a disservice and it might have been introduced deliberately like this to avoid having to change the system of boundary ticketing that was already in existence.)
Personally, I suspect the answer to be one of:
a) tap on a bus and get off again before starting a new journey
b) you can’tTo be clear, I don’t know if a) works or not (or if there are London busses where you’re going) but it’s about the only thing you can do other than tap at a station which obviously won’t work.
If you were subject to a check, the gadgets that the staff use to check cards will simply confirm that you tapped in at the start of your journey and haven’t tapped out yet. If you are found to be “in the system” in this manner then you’ll be free to travel. There is no zone validity type indication of the sort you describe that can be stored anywhere so you’d be fine.
If you didn’t tap in then it probably deducts a penalty fare or something. (The actual detail of how it works is potentially different between Oyster and contactless travel so I’ve generalised a bit.)
This will be doubly complicated because the messaging will presumably come from the DfT who may not care an awful lot about the niceties of Oyster and the TfL charging mechanisms.
As both stations are beyond the Oyster boundary, I should have added that Southern has it’s own contactless solution but it’s different from SWRs. So, for the minute, what card you tap in with or ticket you buy will dictate the trains you’re allowed to travel on.
Hopefully this will change in the next year or so when a new contactless solution for National Rail stations around London is introduced but we’re not there yet.
From those two, your route options are probably twofold. You could go directly into Victoria (on Southern) and then two tube stops to South Ken or you can still take SWR and swap to the District at Wimbledon in the same way as above.
From Leatherhead, the Victoria journey looks to be about an hour with the Wimbledon run being half that but you make up the difference in the longer trip on the tube.
Pricewise, Wimbledon is still cheaper I think (£12.30 + £3.70j as opposed to Victoria (£17.70 + £2.80) although I’m treading on Mike’s toes on his site and he probably has a better handle on all this.
Dorking is just further down the same line so the price difference should be similar on both routes. I haven’t checked yet.
Technically, you wouldn’t need a “paper” ticket since an SWR Touch smartcard could be used for the Weybridge to Wimbledon leg. If you set it up with their “Tap2Go” contactless solution you could touch in and out as if it were an Oyster card and wouldn’t need to queue for ticket machines (or offices).
The disadvantage of this is that, in order to change tickets at Wimbledon, you’d need to tap “out” of your SWR journey as well as tapping “in” to your Oyster/contactless journey. There are Oyster readers on the tube platforms at Wimbledon to do this (the yellow ones, not the pink ones) so you don’t need to go through the barriers, but having to tap two different cards, one after the other, every time you pass, rather than just the one may become a chore. A paper ticket may be easier – It’s your choice.
There are also some yellow validators on the paid side of the barriers to the far (high platform number) end of the underpass. Or there were a year ago. It saves going in and out of the gate line but it’s a bit of a walk if you’re not coming on or off a Southern served platform, particularly at busier times.
I’ve done both, I feel more silly going through the barrier twice but more guilty tapping in or out on the validators! (To be clear, when I do it, I’m not guilty of anything other than a legitimate change of ticket type.)
In an earlier post, Mike suggested that there’s a bug that causes morning peak busses to contribute towards the off-peak cap.
Adding the £1.75 to your off peak travel does indeed total £5.30 so I’d suggest it may be that.
I agree with Alan – you’re misreading the advice. The card and device are different. One’s a card, one’s a phone.
As long as every individual uses a different item to pay with they’ll be fine.
The account that cards/phones happen to be linked to isn’t something that can be checked at the gate line, that all goes on in the backend processing later on so the gate has no way of knowing anything that may link card and phone to the same owner.
Firstly, it’s definitely necessary for one person to tap in and out with the same “thing” to be charged correctly. Your phone is a “thing” and your card is a different “thing”.
As a result, as far as I know, you should be able to use one of those “things” each to make two separate, simultaneous and complete journeys at the same time. I’ve not tried it but that’s how I understand the system to work.
As far as appearing on a TfL online account, my card simply appeared twice. Once for the card itself and once for the Apple Pay version of the card. (I renamed one of them to make it clear which was which.) As stated above, they’re treated as two two different cards so will each be charged and capped separately even though they end up debiting the same bank account.
For completeness for future casual readers I’d modify the brackets in the original post to say:
‘Charged at the usual rate for Zip card people”
since it’s not universally free for them.
I still don’t see how being charged the advertised fare can qualify as being overcharged but you clearly have your own opinion.
The pink validators are a different issue and I’d love a better solution but I’ve yet to come up with one. The oyster system really wasn’t designed for the complexity it’s now having to deal with on a daily basis.
I don’t think it can be argued that the charge is ‘wrong’ in any meaningful way.
TfL publish two fares for travel between these stations and define the circumstances under which they’ll each be charged. Your journey matched one of those two sets of criteria so you were charged the fare that applies to that journey.
The fact that they also supply some textual commentary as to what the zonal assumptions behind the fares are is neither here nor there. A fare between A and B was quoted and that fare was charged.
To my knowledge National Rail fares don’t change based on diversionary routes, so why would TfLs?
Aaand I’m wrong in at least one respect in that a TfL zonal season ticket does come at reduced price for 16+ Oyster card holders.
A station to station season ticket with “16-17 Saver” railcard is still cheaper.
16+ Oyster zone 2/3 annual season = £576
16-17 Saver Clapham-Wimbledon season = £390As I say, it would be cheaper still if you only bought tickets covering term times.
For travel between two SWR stations like this (if you’re aged 16 or 17) it’s likely that a season ticket (which is only valid between those two stations), coupled with a 16-17 railcard (cost £30) will be the cheapest way to travel.
A TfL zonal season ticket will be way more expensive since they don’t come with zip card discounts (so you pay full adult fare) and they cover all stations in the zones across the city so are more pricey than a direct station to station ticket.
The 16-17 railcard gives a 50% discount on the train company standard fare pricing (which, from memory, makes it cheaper than the 16+ Oyster discount) and that applies to season tickets as well as any others for peak time trains as well as off-peak ones.
To make it cheaper still, I’d buy the season tickets for term time only unless you’re also going to travel that journey in the holiday weeks.
If you get the ticket on an SWR smartcard (free) then you can tap in and out just as you do with an Oyster card.
(If you can’t tell, I’ve been though all the maths of this for my 17 yr old daughter’s college runs and this worked out cheapest for her.)
Google street view shows the oyster pads at the foot of the staircases which does tend to be the normal place on these elevated DLR stations. I haven’t heard of anything that might have caused them to be moved recently so it’s a fair bet that they’re still there.
As an afterthought, I assume you could tap twice on the reader at Greenwich but then you’ll probably be charged for two journeys which will be cheaper than a maximum fare but probably more expensive than a single fare.
(Mike can correct me if there’s some sort of OSI type system that joins up exits and entrances at the same reader.)
I think we can predict what TfLs answer to the posed questions will be because of the way the Oyster system works:
1. You don’t need to tap anything, it should just work (subject to maximum times etc.)
2. It is a valid interchangeYou’ll never get a different answer to question 2 since there’s no such thing as valid or an invalid interchanges within a station. The Oyster system doesn’t know where you’ve been, it only knows where you’ve tapped – you could (theoretically) travel by balloon, jet ski or teleportation between stations and, as long as you tapped in and out within the permitted journey times, it would likely be counted as a valid journey.
The real question to answer is what happened in the case of the journeys you tried.
The ‘one tap in the middle’ journey is obvious since you terminated your Oyster trip at Greenwich and didn’t start a new one before getting on a train. Without knowing where you started and finished, however, there’s really very little that anyone can offer.
I have one theory (hence the use of the word ‘likely’ in the balloon paragraph) but I suspect it would look silly once I found out where your journey ended so I’ll hang on to it for the moment.
See: https://tfl.gov.uk/fares/free-and-discounted-travel/60-plus-oyster-photocard
Regardless of what the website does or doesn’t seem to allow, the advice here is “You can’t add credit to your 60+ London Oyster photocard to pay as you go.”
As Mike says, the 60+ card is valid on the advertised services and you’ll need to buy another form of ticket for travelling with anyone else.
The problem with the Clapham route is simply time. If you have the time then there’s money to be saved as described but expect to sit on an Overground train for a bit before departure. I’ve only tried it a couple of times but due to scheduling I had about a 10 minute wait for departure (and the South London line doesn’t seem to be the fastest bit of track around.)
In reverse, the issue may be fitting onto the return train to Strawberry Hill. My journey is on the Epsom line and we have half the service we had pre-COVID so getting onto the train on a mid-week evening is a squeeze. For that reason alone, I tend to opt for a Waterloo change rather than anywhere else. That may not be a problem on your line of course.
With the W&C it’s the popularity and thus the crowds that may be an issue. I’ve only tried it post-COVID and it’s manageable if not completely stress free. Pre-COVID I suspect it was a nightmare. It probably is the fastest route, though, rather than running via Vauxhall and joining the crowds on platform 8 on the return journey.
I can’t advise anything extra as to cost since Mike knows much more than me and my payment mechanism is different.
In terms of the “If I did this then surely the cheap fare would apply” question, the system will only charge fares that it knows about and the fare finder shows. In this case, the fare you’re looking for doesn’t exist in the system even if the route exists in reality so won’t be charged no matter what gets tapped where.
Hopefully it will be added to the database if it’s seen as a reasonable route to take.
