Baker Street London Terminal

suspect ticket gates are not clever to work out what your origin and therefore routing is. nr ticket routing is a complicated affair with frequent easements for disrupted services. All the gate is probably looking for is the valid London terminals destination. of course a person should notice...

i remember when using Watford junction using a particular ticket, the gates would always reject it as the kind of ticket i had wasn't valid on London midland in the peak, but was on southern...

National Rail tickets which allow travel between Marylebone and stations on the ex-Met/GC line are valid to/from Baker Street. Although at first glance, one would think this would just include stations on that line. However, due to an easement which allows any journey to Marylebone via High Wycombe being valid via Aylesbury, a huge array of NR tickets are valid to/from Baker Street. This includes tickets such as Birmingham Stations - London Terminals, Holyhead - London Terminals, Inverness - London Terminals etc. I suspect LU staff at Baker Street have no/little idea of this and would prevent you from travelling if they spotted you with such tickets.

Without knowing your exact ticket, it is impossible to confirm whether it is valid to/from Baker Street. However, as suncloud has stated, I suspect the barriers at Baker St are just programmed to accept London Terminals tickets.

baker street (lu) is in nr ticketing terms a London terminal, whereas Waterloo for example the only way you can arrive from a nr origin with a London terminals ticket is on a nr service. as a London terminals ticket is never valid on lu services at Waterloo, of course the gates will reject it...

i think lu gates that might take London terminals tickets will be limited, guessing farringdon, moorgate, (maybe barbican for historical reasons), maybe Paddington, but that's likely to be it... (of course just because your ticket works a gate, does of course not necessarily mean it is valid for the journey you're making)

The barriers at King's Cross St Pancras will also accept London Terminals tickets owing to an easement that makes tickets from NR points north valid to Old Street and Moorgate, but not intermediately at Farringdon, Barbican or Angel. This is to cover there being no NR service to Moorgate at weekends, but is valid at all times. I found it useful for a couple of years when I often had to go to Hackney in the evenings (in the days before the ELL extension), and so it saved me the extra fare from Old Street to KX when using a Cambridge - London Terminals season. Though I did often pray that my ticket wouldn't demagnetise in case this resulted in an argument with staff.

Since I also had a King's Cross Thameslink - City Thameslink season to get me to work, which was valid at Farringdon for NR services, this had the potential to lead to a situation where I had a ticket that would open the barriers at Farringdon and also a ticket that was valid on board LU services (from Moorgate), but would have no valid ticket with one leg on the platform and one on a train.

Casting my memory back decades when I first created the base data then yes certain LU stations which have the ability to act as a "London Terminal" because of ticket interavailability. Only one code is used with the gate data so any ticket encoded with that NLC will be accepted (all other things being valid like dates etc). The relevant NLC might be the origin or destination or possibly intermediate availability - this applies at King Cross given the weird arrangements when the Great Northern City service runs to KX and not Moorgate. Tickets are valid at certain intermediate stations between KX and Moorgate but not all of them. I would imagine your ticket would work at Moorgate and Old Street too.

I think you need to consider whether the fraud exposure from such tickets would ever be big enough to create vastly more complex data and checks when making the observation about the ticket gates "are not clever enough". The complexity issue was not just confined to LU as obviously British Rail and their APTIS system had to be able to cope with issuing tickets that would be compatible with UTS. Life has moved on a long way since then but the fundamentals have proved to be long lived despite ticket gates on NR, the death of APTIS, more open ticket issuing technology on NR plus smart ticketing too.

Yes but as I stated before LU staff at Baker Street would probably prevent you from travelling if they spotted you with a rover. LU staff training regarding National Rail tickets is atrocious. Another problem for passengers is that neither LU or NR publish a public official list of inter-available routes.