Stations north of Hatch End

I believe I saw somewhere that Carpenders Park to Watford Junction would be absorbed into Zone A. It was part of a letter discussing terms for the new Silverlink County franchisee (before London Midland had been chosen), and requesting that whoever it was would be forced to acccept PAYG to Watford Junction.

However, agree with Colin that it's probably awaiting January.

For now zonal travelcards are not valid north of Hatch End. (You can of course buy a Watford Junction + Zone 1-6 travelcard for example). Special fares apply for pay as you go customers. Although they are not including these stations in zones A-D, the Pay As You Go fares for Carpenders Park are identical to those for zone B stations, Bushey and Watford High Street zone C, and Watford Junction zone D stations.

Tubeboy is correct that in January there will be zones 1-9 to cover both the north end of the Met and London Overground. However I believe the plan is for Watford Junction to remain a special case in zone 'W'!

Well I would like the zones to work on a county basis. I think Watford as it is in Herts should be in the same zone as Ricky! They are pretty close. Chorleywood and beyond are in Bucks. After all the 258 runs to Watford via Bushey and you can use Oyster on that bus service.

Living in Bushey, I'm hardly objective, but based on distance from zone 1, I don't really understand why the stations north of Hatch End are considered so "far out".

Surely Carpenders Park is similar to Borehamwood (zone 6)? And Watford Junction is closer to London than Watford Met, and used to be served by the Bakerloo (before the zones were drawn up) so why should it be beyond even Zone 9?

I do realise that there is more to it than this, and that the London Midland franchise operates on this route, which must allow them to have some clout regarding the cash box. Still, it seems rather arbitrary to me.

It used to be that Loughton was in zone 6 and Debden outside the zones... Few people would walk from Loughton station to Debden. However quite a lot of Debden residents already alight at Loughton because of the better bus and taxi services...

For the life of me, I cannot understand how Bushey is considered further out than Moor Park and Watford (Met).

I suspect that it may just be down to profitability. The Met gets high patronage that far out as it runs fast services. The DC line doesn't/can't, ergo less people use the all stations service and it thus costs more to operate the DC lines and higher fares are required. The only way the DC lines can even come close to competing on speed with the Met is for passengers to change at H&W. If only more railways were line grouped by direction instead of speed, having non-stopping expresses would be so much easier to provide.

like the old "green bus" country area?

It would be a bit pointless as the rail operators would probably make more profit from someone buying a ticket rather than using a travelcard. You wouldn't be able to use a travelcard on buses out there either.

Well at least it seems that London Midland have caved in, and will be accepting PAYG on their services to Watford Junction, as reported in the Watford Observer

There was an arcticle in the Standard on monday about changing from station to station fares to zonal fares. According to the arcticle overall fares wouldn't be more but there would be "about 50,000 people - such as those at the inner edge of a zone - will be hunderds of pounds worse off". The move in 2010 is about getting Oyster on all rail routes in the travelcard zones but theres already camaigns about this. Infact MP Ed Davey is trying to get Kingston & Surbition moved zones to decrease the cost before complete zoning comes in.

Now Grays & Dartford I can talk about.........

Dartford is, I believe, part of Ken's original Overground network - that's the one where TfL dictate that trains must run every 15 minutes minimum until a certain time at night and in exchange TfL promotes the service and installs extras such as station CCTV etc. The same was planned for stations on the c2c as far as Grays, but c2c resisted and AFAIK Ken is still trying.

Oyster will go as far as Grays though, now that all the TOC's are on board including c2c - so I suspect zoning to Grays will happen at some point in the near future.

To qualify the point further, there are now two London bus routes to Lakeside shopping centre (370 & 372).............infact Dartford also has London bus routes including the 96 which goes as far as Bluewater shopping centre.

I can't speak for staines (though that has a London bus route numbered somewhere in the 80's dosen't it?) but in any case, the old London Country bus area dose seem a very credible/sensible suggestion to me.