"From the 19th of November..."

Especially if the Ticket Office is closed (because the Business Need says it should be), it's late at night, the reason the card doesnt work is because LU didnt alias a station and the customer has no money.

What will happen, the Supervisor cant open to ticket office as it would be a "serious disaplinary matter"

Just to clear things up

The £4 charge only applies to PAYG customers. TC users, even on an extension, won't be charged. Whoopps meant to say won't be charged the £4. They will be charged at the pre Nov19th rates.

Station staff are only authorised to refund the £4 for a known problem. S/S's have no special powers over this.

Off the record, Oyster will refund once for incomplete journeys, unless LU are at fault.

More staff are being employed at the Oyster helpdesk (yeah right!!!)

Little fact, if this £4 charge doesn't change peoples habits, i.e. you still see alot of incomplete journeys, LU will earn approx an extra £3 million.

I'm on A/L for 3 weeks, so hopefully it'll all be over by the time I get back to work.

I'm soooo glad I don't work in the ticket office anymore

It just get's worse - the old system was fine (pre prestige)! why fix something if it isn't broken?

I can see people being very careful to touch in and out correctly at CTK. Those standalone validators always strike me as a weak point if someone is in a hurry.

If I get the same problem at KCM (correct touch in but gate decides that it has better things to do than open) I may start to throw things. This assumes that I'm not being a cheapskate in that direction as usual by buying a single with gold card discount for £1 (a not very well advertised FCC only fare). I would imagine that the overheads on that ticket must be quite significant.

For reference this convoluted method results in a cost of £500 a year assuming 200 working days a year, while an annual Zones 1-2 Travelcard (the only season available on that route) is £888. That's still quite a saving even if I do buy some special £4.80 Z1-6 Travelcards at weekends. Come January that cost should drop to nothing as there is expected to be a policy change allowing stations to London Bridge (or maybe Elephant) to be "London Terminals" from the north.

You contact the Oyster helpline (at 3.5p per minute from a BT landline) and explain to them. They can then check the system and then normally refund you the extra fare. (AFAIK this is in vouchers and not an automatic top-up, but this MAY have changed).

Just looked there: the most outrageous is that if there is an 'incident' and you cannot continue your journey from the same station but have to transfer, you get charged the penalty if you haven't touched out.

So, if there is a fire or security alert and evacuation is demanded, you have to touch out whilst emptying the station or you will be charged for your efforts to clear the area.

Which means, what are CSAs trained to do if a (say) trainful of passengers insists on touching out one by one and there is a genuine security concern??

Being burned alive would almost be preferable to convincing the Oyster Helpline to give you your money back. I wouldn't have bothered for my £1.50 if I was paying the bill.

Thankfully I had a gold card special day travelcard when I was last travelling through Wimbledon. They're going to have to find some way of encoding the various railcard entitlements on to oyster if they actually want anyone to use it for NR journeys in off peak hours.

If we recall Bill's post somewhere above, he was discussing having a ODTC [one day travelcard] coded up for the card. Well, as we know, lots of Train operating Companies do the ODTC, so when Oyster is rolled out for ALL National Rail TOC's, I guess this WILL have to be added to the system... I hope so, because that will help out everyone...