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Thanks Mike
My old card was one of those briefly issued by London councils around 2004 – in my case Lewisham, and I did use it as my library card for a few years before that functionality was cut back. I’d be interested in the history behind them, but that’s for another time… fair to say when I showed to TfL staff the normal reply was “that’s not an Oyster card!”.
So it had a notional penny deposit on it and that with the rest of the balance and validity appears to have been transferred entirely to the new card – I incurred no additional costs. I can imagine an observant inspector might be surprised to see an Oyster balance ending in 1 or 6, though I guess the actual sum doesn’t appear on a routine check.
On my original query I’m thinking the procedure for claiming must be similar to a forgotten season ticket. I’ll keep a track of my travel costs and hopefully the new card will arrive soon.
Just a belated aside and warning to others (unrelated to the original issue). When I got my Gold Card discount added at the tube station below a certain National Rail Station had a helpful but confused staff member. Before I intervened he was going to add a NR Priv discount to my Oyster (these appearing at top of the discount options). I suggested he go back and scroll down the list and sure enough National Railcards option appeared at the end. I don’t like to think about what might have transpired if he had given a less clued up user a Priv discount…
Good news! I was finally able to renew online just now with no error messages and the usual security checks working perfectly.
I don’t know if using my home WiFi rather than the hotel WiFi I was on the last few days made the difference. Given my attempt to renew by phone a few days ago also didn’t work, I suspect not. Most likely the glitch has been resolved by the payment provider. I still have to load the renewal to my Oyster but hopefully there will be no further issues!
Thanks Mike. From my conversation with TfL it seems the glitch lies with their payment provider. At least I’ve encountered nothing similar before – I used an older version of this card last year to buy my current travelcard, so perhaps there was some tweak in the SCA since then.
I’ll try to renew at a Visitor Centre on Wednesday and report back – thank goodness they still exist!
And thanks for the advice on TOC smartcards – I’ve also found the FAQ page on the Key which mentions in passing that travelcards on it must be issued from outside the zones, which must exclude a large number of Southeastern passengers. I guess it protects the integrity of Oyster but this mess of rival smartcards just perpetuates needless complexities…
