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Thanks for coming back to us. I’m pleased that they considered a refund in your case. I do not share your optimism that they will correct the fare tables for services which may only run on a handful of days a year.
Hi Kt,
Generally the extension fares are the same as the single fares for the zones required at the scale applying to the journey. The Fares Guide page attempts to explain what fares apply for each sort of journey. In your case you needed the zone 1 and zone 4 fares because zones 2 and 3 were paid for. Extension fares work from the boundary between zones so you don’t pay for a zone twice. On National Rail routes the extension fare might be 5p or 10p more for reasons best known to them.
Yes, if you’d used Jubilee or Northern and District to get to Richmond you would have been charged the sum of the two extensions.
Dear Mr A Non, please contact me using a proper email address at mike @ oysterfares.com.
Multiple routes using different zone ranges is not new, but the high profile nature of the Elizabeth line does mean that some new cases in East London have become obvious. There has long been a case for a pink reader at Woolwich Arsenal so I doubt that anything will happen now.
As for pink readers in general, touching them is entirely optional so they could never be used to prove that a higher fare route had been taken. Most of them do prove that zone 1 has been avoided, but there are a few other uses too. In particular the one at Rayners Lane often proves that zones 1, 2 and sometimes 3 have been avoided. Also the one at Highbury and Islington can sometimes say that zone 3 has been avoided. Yes, really!
Hi,
There’s lots of issues in this thread so I’ll try and cover them as they arise.
First caps. Zone 1-2 with railcard is £7.70 all day and £5.10 if all travel is after 0930. Zone 1-3 is £9.00 all day and £5.95 if all travel is after 0930. I’m not sure how you can get £9.40, but if you copy all the journey history for that day I should be able to explain. Hornsey is in zone 3 whereas Finsbury Park is in zone 2 and it doesn’t matter where you use buses.
Barking is in zone 4 so if alternative routes use that station they would charge more. This is why City Airport to Crouch Hill is higher because the default route is via Barking (zones 3-4) whereas the other routes are only zone 3. The fare finder on this site displays the zones covered by each fare for just this reason.
So, you can’t use via Barking on your Crouch Hill to Whitechapel journey, but you can use via Highbury & Islington and Stratford if you start from Turnpike Lane (or indeed Hornsey). You need to touch pink readers at both change points.
Hope this helps.
Hi Busong,
“Am I right in thinking that if I had done the rail journeys in reverse order and hit the Z1-2 cap first before travelling out to Zone 6, I will only be charged Z3-6 for that final journey?”
If you had reached the zone 1-2 cap before embarking on a zone 2-6 journey then you’d be charged for the zone 2-6 journey in full. As it happens, in your case that wouldn’t make a difference as the zone 2-6 and 3-6 off-peak fares are the same. As Alan notes above, you would need to have made the bus journeys before the rail journey to West Drayton as well.
That’s a good alternative, Chris. Obviously a zone 1-9 Anytime travelcard is required (unless the challenge is being done on an engineering free weekend. You may need to select Amersham as the origin station to ensure that you get all the zones. There is no need to start at Amersham though.
Hi Jonathan,
I would not recommend doing either Oyster or contactless. The problem is that you have to adhere to maximum journey times between touch in and touch out, and also keep track of out-of-station-interchanges joining journeys together. If this happens then you’ll be charged two maximum fares and neither will count towards the daily cap.
There is one potential compromise which is to buy a weekly zone 1-9 travelcard on your Oyster card and then cancel the Oyster card at the end of the day. This will result in the unused part of the travelcard being refunded. It will also result in the Oyster card being cancelled. A replacement will now cost £7 and is not refundable.
Good luck with the challenge though.
Hi jjcantab,
I’ll raise this as an issue. It looks like they need to add another OSI at Waterloo to cope with what you are experiencing. For now my advice is to avoid steps 3 and 4 and I’m sure the journey will be charged correctly.
Hi Anthony,
Apologies for the delay replying. Group Travelcards is not an area of my expertise. The only comment I will make is that group tickets are usually intended for a group that stays together. If the minimum group size is ten then I would expect that that applies at all times. If you had 20 people then you could get two groups of ten and each group could go separately at some point.
Hi JL,
Flexi season tickets are not an option within London because daily caps are already 1/5 of the weekly cap/travelcard. The daily cap for zones 1-6 is £14.10 and will be reached if two peak time journeys are made. It doesn’t really matter which route you take. One option you may not have considered is Kingston – Wimbledon – Farringdon – Barbican/Moorgate. This may be slower on the travel time, but cuts out long walks between trains at Waterloo and wherever else you change on the Underground. Both Wimbledon and Farringdon are simply crossing a footbridge, and on the way home it’s adjacent platforms at Farringdon.
Thanks for your input “a non”. I’d quite like to be able to contact you privately, but I strongly suspect the email you used won’t work.
Hi Jazz,
Tying it all together, if you pass through zone 1 then you will be charged a zone 1 extension fare. You can have more than one travelcard on an Oyster card, but each one has to be for at least two zones and they must join together at adjacent zones. If you just want to add zone 1 then you might be better off waiting. If your travelcard is for a long period then you could try getting an exchange which will cost £5 plus the difference in price for the remainder of the validity. As Alan says, you can add a 16-25 railcard to get discounts on off-peak fares and caps, including extension fares.
Hi Jack,
It’s complicated.
You might get a bit of a clue reading the Fares Guide page, but the anomaly you are referring to is niche. Firstly, Amersham to Finchley Road is on the standard TfL-LU scale which is usually the cheapest. Although Epsom is in zone 9 its fares are set by South Western Railway so they don’t quite match the NR scale. Brentwood is on the TfL-Ang scale which is a hybrid scale forced on TfL when they took over the Anglia services out of Liverpool Street. It used to be worse, but now the differences between TfL-LU and TfL-Ang are limited to zones 7-9 and longer distance off-peak journeys in zones 2-6.
So, initially there were three scales covering just about everything on Oyster. TfL-LU was the Underground, DLR and any NR company using TfL’s fares (obviously including Overground, but also C2C and GWR amongst others). NR was for the late adopting companies (Southeastern, Southern etc) and also applied to any wholly NR journeys using Overground, C2C etc as well as late adopting NR. Finally NR-T was any journey on late adopting NR which also included Underground or DLR. There are some variations, but that’s broadly the picture.
After some complaints around discontinuing season tickets when LO took over some of Southern’s services, The DfT imposed restrictions when they took over the Anglia routes. These hybrid fares were to apply on any TfL journey that included the Anglia routes. However, where a journey included TfL-Ang, TfL-LU and late adopting NR it became, I think, too complicated. The result is that NR overrode TfL-Ang and produces the anomaly you have discovered.
There is no point in asking TfL to reduce fares from Brentwood to Whitechapel because they can’t. If you highlight the discrepancy when you include late adopting NR routes the outcome will either be nothing, or the lower fares will get raised. I hope this helps.
Hi Andy,
You only need to touch in once. The set time is 3 days so you’ll have no problems if it’s tomorrow. And you’ll need Balham Underground station to link the railcard.
And it’s now been corrected. 7-8 and 8-9 have always been the same as 6-7 so I altered the header to reflect that and removed them from the header of the last but one line. The fares have been re-loaded for the last two years for the single zone row.
Hi Martin,
I’m not seeing any changes from Woolwich Arsenal DLR.
I will raise Abbey Wood though, if you start there and go via Whitechapel then it should be TfL only.
Hi London commuter,
Are you sure it’s a yellow reader that you touch at Richmond? There are pink interchange readers there which are intended for people changing trains in the middle of a PAYG journey. If you touch on one of those and you aren’t in the system then it will start a new journey, but it won’t end one the other way around. You need to exit through the gates and re-enter with your paper ticket so that it will end the journey correctly.
It will save a little money by switching to PAYG at Feltham. The SWR ticket is £5.20 cheaper and the PAYG peak single is £2.10 more expensive, so a saving of £1.00. You would have to get off the train to touch in/out. It might be worthwhile investigating where the gates/validators are at Feltham in case you can seat yourself in the correct part of the train to hop off, touch, and hop on again. If you do this you will also have to touch the pink reader at Richmond to ensure you are charged the avoiding zone 1 fare.
I’m not sure. If there was just one pink reader involved then I’d say yes you would be. But there are two and they are both sited in the same zone (2/3). However, if you want to be certain to be charged the correct fare then travel the wrong way first and touch the pink reader at Willesden Junction before returning.
This is classed as a temporary or limited service route so changes to the normal fare tables are unlikely to be arranged.
I’ve just started looking at the scope of this and thankfully the fares quoted are those for 7-8 and 8-9 which are the more expensive ones. I’ll need to add a new row at some point in the near future.
Hi Michael,
Cuffley and Epsom are oddities. In both cases the stations are in zone 9, and caps/travelcards including zone 9 are valid, but the price of a Cuffley/Epsom to zones 1-6 travelcard season is significantly cheaper than the zone 1-9 version. Thus the zonal status of these stations is hidden. The fares are also set by different TOCs so there is no standard fares.
Amersham, Brentwood and Chesham fares are all set by TfL and there is no X to zones 1-6 option.
Hi Michael,
That’s a good spot. They used to be the same but recently TfL have been separating fares like that. I’ll need to make some changes shortly.
So, yesterday I travelled from Crossharbour to London Bridge NR via Greenwich without touching any validators en-route. Here is the journey history:
OK, my son (who lived near Waterloo for a year) and I went up there a few days ago so I can now offer a more comprehensive answer. If you enter from Waterloo Road through the colonade then there are three ways you can go. Straight ahead on the left are escalators up to the mainline station opposite platforms 3-4. To the right of those escalators is the Jubilee line ticket hall with escalators going down after you’ve been through gates. As you look at those gates from near the NR escalators there is a set of steps up to a balcony which is signposted for the Waterloo and City line. Follow the signs after climbing the steps and you’ll get there quite quickly.
The only other street entrance to the Underground that we are aware of is in York Road where the Shell Centre is. If you use that entrance then you will have to enter through gates and exit again before getting to the Waterloo and City platforms. So instead of using that entrance we recommend going into the mainline station and using the Underground entrance next to platform 19, as previously suggested.
Thanks for the update Nick,
I’d need the error number displayed on the gate to know what might have happened, though I doubt it’s connnected to the pick up of the refund. It is possible that some touch data was delayed getting to the central system or that there was a problem running the overnight process which caused the delay. Good that you’re now up to date.
