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One more question! With contactless, are there any restrictions or rules affecting the route that you can take (assuming that you only touch in and out once)? This is leaving aside the routing options enabled by the pink readers. For example, in the Zones, can I travel to an inner zone via one or more outer zones?
The question is in relation to Shoreham and Eynsford, where tickets are offered either ‘via Swanley’ or via ‘Any permitted’, which is via Sevenoaks at slightly higher cost. It is often quicker to go via Sevenoaks, changing trains. Brfares.com currently shows CPAY contactless fares routed ‘via Swanley’ – which I believe is a nonsense, since I didn’t think routing could be applied to contactless fares.
Given the number of loops in the railway network south of the Thames, one can think of lots of cases where one might want to do something like this.
Thank you very much for that. Turns out that the off-peak cap doesn’t mitigate the ‘Evening Peak Trap’ for people who travel towards London offpeak. Looking at the live Chiltern rates, the offpeak caps are not generous and are typically the same as or more than the total of peak+offpeak single fares if no tube journey is involved. The off peak cap seems to be set at the offpeak travelcard rate on Chiltern.
However, there is another way of avoiding the Evening Peak Trap (aside from the Offpeak-with-travelcard option). This is to buy an old fashioned day return ticket from further back down the line!
For example: Sevenoaks-London Terminals, travelling out after 9:30ish and back 16:00-19:00:
Offpeak plus peak singles: £8 + £14.60 = £22.60 (cash or contactless)
Offpeak with Travelcard: £20.80 (cash)
Offpeak day return from Hildenborough £18.70 !Thus sadly, the evening peak fares further reduce the usefulness of the contactless system.
Btw on our line, many passengers can travel to London without the need for the Tube, thanks to the location of Charing Cross and the many main line stations that we can travel to. So there is less need for the Travelcard benefits.
One more question re capping. The very detailed Chiltern website (https://www.chilternrailways.co.uk/paygexpansion) says:” Any pay as you go with contactless journeys made between 16:00 and 19:00 will still count towards an off-peak cap.”
So if I travel to London after 9:30 and come back between 16:00 and 19:00, my evening peak contactless fare is added to my earlier fares, but I only pay up to the Off Peak cap? But if so, what is the point of the Peak Cap?
So perhaps this is a mitigation of the problem caused by the introduction of the evening peak fares on National Rail where there were none before (all depending on the capping level)?
Again it would help if you could explain this in your info pages.
Cross-London journeys: There is one other thing that you could clarify, which is not completely clear from the train company information, and (possibly!) from your excellent advice columns. There appears to be a hard and fast TfL rule that if you travel inbound to Zone 1 between 16:00 and 19:00, you pay the contactless offpeak fare if your journey ends in Zone 1. If your journey passes through Zone 1 and out the other side to any station outside Zone one, and you touch in between 16:00 and 19:00, you are charged the peak fare. Correct? The same rules appear to apply to Oval cash fares for mainline journeys.
I think the rule should be made clearer: if travelling in the evening MF peak, the fare paid is determined by the time that you touch in PLUS your destination station. The peak/off peak price differences may only be a quid or two on the Tube, but are substantial once you get outside London.
In some cases, it will be cheaper to buy separate cash tickets or use two contactless cards to optimise the fares. Eg Beaconsfield to Whitechapel after 16:00 would save £4.40 with two cards for two separate contactless journeys
Can you please clarify something about Contactless in the evening peak? Is it the definitely the case that case that if I touch my first reader before 16:00 M-F, I will never be charged the peak fare – irrespective of how many times I pass in an out of gates en route after 16:00? For example, mainline to Euston, then tube then train to Sevenoaks (at least 4 intermediate touches).
Reason for question is that if you look up the Oval cash fare (single or day return) say from Beaconsfield to Sevenoaks, the last train that you can catch with an offpeak fare is given as the 14:09 from Beaconsfield. This because later trains connect into trains leaving London after 16:00. Same goes for other similar cross-London journeys starting on National Rail. I want to find out whether use of contactless overcomes this issue and is not affected by the departure time from the London terminus.
As part of project Oval, new cash fares have been implemented on all lines affected by contactless expansion, in order match the new contactless fares. There are new peak and offpeak single fares. This has good and bad effects.
The good news is that single fares are cheaper. Instead of the old practice that a single was more or less the same price as an offpeak day return, the new offpeak single is now half the day return fare.These cash single fares are the same as the contactless fares, which are shown on brfares.com.
The bad news is that the TfL system of treating a journey out of London between 16:00-19:00 as ‘peak’ means that an offpeak trip to London returning between 16:00-19:00 is more expensive. Moreover this applies to all journeys – including local journeys where you travelling away from London in the peak. You can still buy a cash offpeak return, but it’s not valid at those times. I wonder how many innocent people have been caught in this trap. And unlike on the tube, the difference in price between offpeak and peak fares can be large.
The only way round this is to buy an offpeak return to London with Travelcard, which does allow return anytime after 09.30 M-F.
Finally, a positive feature of Oval is that the cash single fares are the same as the contactless fares – unlike the Tube, Lizzie and earlier contactless implementations. In the latter cases, the choice is between a contactless offpeak fare and an anytime cash single fare at a much higher price. This means that discounting the cash fare with a railcard often leaves you with a ticket that’s more expensive than a contactless fare (which cannot be discounted using a railcard).
From what I can see, the above applies to all of the lines to which contactless is being extended.
I’m Vice-Chair of Darent Valley Community Rail Partnership, and Southeastern has told us that Contactless will be extended to stations on the lines to Sevenoaks on 22 September, as part of Project OVAL. The readers and associated equipment have been installed and running for over a year now (fyi they incorporate Cisco hardware among other things). Stations covered are Eynsford, Shoreham (Kent), Otford, Bat & Ball, Sevenoaks and Dunton Green. This forum looks like a good place to post information about this route and others as contactless is implemented. The implementation is long delayed, so we don’t know if it will happen on the 22nd.
