Oyster Card and Senior Railcard

AIUI the person in the ticket hall, ever eager to help you, will be able to sign on to one of the passenger operated machines and confirm your railcard discount at that machine and your Oyster Card will be updated at the same time by touching the card on the machine reader. In other words some of the ticket office machine functionality is being ported across to the passenger machines when they are put into "staff mode" by a trained member of staff.

Happy to be corrected if that is not the case.

You probably still won't be able to renew at an unmanned station, even after the new arrangements come into force.

Can't see why it can't be done over the phone. After all, I can buy a NR ticket online without showing a railcard - woe betide if I use it without showing the railcard!

An allied question if I may please - after all local ticket offices are closed how will one be able to purchase privilege tickets on request? It was bad enough when ticket office hours were reduced and as I am now ancient enough to have a Freedom Pass I'm not affected, but I do have priv-entitled friends from outside London. I seem to recall that on the Tyne & Wear Metro the priv. rate equated to the child rate and enforcement was via the on-train revenue protection staff, but I'm not sure that would work on LUL.

Fair enough. I saw the reference to Hillingdon and made the rash assumption that staff would always be present. I accept that places like Roding Valley have very thin / non existent staffing presence. I am, however, prepared to see if LU meets its public commitment to staff all stations for all hours that a service runs. That's what's been said and the new operating model clearly relies on that key element. The other aspect, for ticketing, is that the machines keep working and remain replenished where they handle cash. If staff aren't around and the machines conk out regularly then TfL / LU will have an unmitigated disaster on their hands because people will not be able to travel in a number of cases. In other cases they won't wish to travel if they find the system to be unsafe.

I saw a tweet earlier today from someone who has been trying to top up using cash that the multi fare at Queensway (no longer any ticket office) has been unable to handle a cash transaction for three days. That's beyond useless.

Thanks also from me. I must have missed any notification that may have been in the last bulletin from the Retired Staff Travel Facilities office at Darlington. So long as the Freedom Passes continue to be granted I won't have to worry about this at present.

Apologies if this is a bit off topic but it looks as though the Oyster machines have stopped saying "next time why not top up online?". Which is a blessed relief as it always annoyed me - the answer being "because it is much less convenient to top up online than to do it at the station which I have to come to anyhow in order to catch a train".