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For the record (and anyone reading this in 2 years time), I meant to say £6.80 and £6.70 with the Oyster single being £3.40.
No. Both Shenfield and a lot of the stations towards Reading are outside the fare zones so a travelcard won’t cover them.
You could do the whole thing as a set of Oyster or contactless journeys if you’re going to leave each station when you get there (and you travel within the journey time limit each time). The only other alternative is a set of different paper tickets to cover the different legs of your journey but I’m not clever enough to know what tickets you should get for the cheapest travelling.
If I had to guess, I’d suggest it was because Ewell West is subject to a normal Oyster Zonal fare (z4-6) so will be standardised at the Oyster rate while the Epsom fare is probably set by SWR and won’t be related to oyster rates at as it’s outside the zones.
Changing at a terminal station normally seems to carry a price premium so perhaps that comes into play in the charging choice.
The Chiltern website will sell you a ticket to Marylebone with exactly the same peak/off peak price differential in the evening so I wouldn’t rush to say TfL have it wrong and no evening peak applies when they agree with the operator who actually runs the trains and sets the fares.
To address part of the original post, London Overground run the service to Shepherds Bush from platform 1 at Clapham Junction.
As a TfL service, check with them for adjustments.
I’d also add that there’s probably no need to tap a freedom pass on platform 1 before boarding but it won’t do any harm if you do.
There is no “default” route as such, the listed fare covers every route that doesn’t involve changing at any of the places listed.
So going to Clapham, Overground to Whitechapel and the Liz line to Liverpool Street would be an example (if I read it all correctly).
Tolworth -> Wimbledon -> Paddington -> Liverpool Street perhaps?
SWR – District – Elizabeth in this case.
Clapham to the Overground and on from there is another possibility I suppose but it’s not that direct
“The Max charge you’ve already paid” should be refunded when you contact them to explain what happened so there’s no “benefit” to be had from it.
In that situation, I’d probably tap in and out of the original station with no service to make it clear what I did and then in again at the alternative. It would be nice if there was something more technological to handle these situations but I don’t know what that would look like.
Before the hopper fare, getting kicked off an early terminating bus gave the option of getting a transfer ticket but I don’t know if that’s still done since the hopper would absorb most consequential problems.
Bluntly, if you were using Pay as You go Oyster on that journey, of course you’d be expected to get off a train and tap in or out at the Oyster boundary. That’s the way the system works and those are the rules of accessing it.
Just because it would be inconvenient to the traveller isn’t a reason that they could skip a step. The option exists to buy a through ticket or use contactless and avoid the stop so choosing not to take those options is accepting the need to work within the rules of the oyster system.
I think that having a travelcard covering the whole journey out to the Oyster boundary as well as a paper ticket from there would be about the only way to legally do the journey without getting off a train.
From Mike’s post on the previous page, the following is currently true of the cap for travel in the zones between Watford Junction and zone 1 but this will likely change next month when the annual fare increases are applied:
“The Anytime cap is £28.60 and the off-peak cap (after 0930 weekdays) is £21.30.“
Is this the routing that Southern (the government) have cut and LO was looking to potentially adopt, however unlikely that seems?
If so, does the default route still make sense as a default in light of whatever the current service pattern is?
(If this isn’t that route, the question probably doesn’t make sense)
The problem with that approach is the need to have the card on you for inspection and photo verification. A mobile phone token couldn’t handle the photos and people would doubtlessly leave the cards at home and travel using their devices and thus run the risk of penalty fares etc for not carrying what they need to.
If you get hold of a SWR Touch card, that will allow you a “tap in” – “tap out” contactless experience on SWR services, then you could use true contactless (I.e. bank card) on the tube section of your journey.
If the change at Wimbledon, the fiddly bit will be the need to “tap out” of your SWR journey and “tap in” to your TfL tube journey on the way in and the reverse on the return journey. You’d need to tap both cards, one after the other, on one of the Yellow validators on the tube platforms (not the pink ones on the underground concourse!).
Given that fares in these areas are purely dictated by the train operating companies (I believe), I think the chances of anything ‘new’ being introduced is unlikely. I don’t really see GWR and SWR agreeing to reduce the fares they charge just because people walk between the stations.
I look forward to being proved wrong, of course.
TfL aren’t involved at this point as far as I know. It’s just on the Monzo systems to time out the transaction as per the original request.
Arguably they should be involved, of course, and cancel the transaction themselves rather than taking the passive approach they seem to be using.
Pending transactions are supposed to ‘drop off’ after 7 days or so if they’re not collected. The double posting may be down to TfL, I don’t know, but this is more of a banking issue than a contactless one.
Given that you can only top up an Oyster card from an online order as part of a journey, are you sure it isn’t simply the standard deduction for the ‘journey start’ being made? i.e. adding £5 and then taking the £2.40 from that as whatever the standard initial fare deduction from your local station is.
As an additional question, are you actually taking a journey when you tap the card to top it up?
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.
