On Jan 3, 8:19*pm, "Michael R N Dolbear" wrote:
Rupert Candy wrote

On Jan 3, 12:51*pm, "Paul Scott"
wrote:

You cannot register Gold Cards or Network Cards onto Oyster cards
And this, to my mind, is the biggest fudge of the whole lot. *The

whole point of the Gold Card is that it recognises the loyalty of
those who put up ~2 grand in advance, and the Oyster card must 'know'
it holds an annual season. *How hard would it be for said annual
season to trigger an automatic 'Railcard' flag, thus allowing Gold
Card holders the same reduced cap as (e.g.) YP card holders?

As discussed here, the cheapest Gold card is less than £150 (forget
whether it is between Ryde - Ryde Pierhead or Exeter/other Exeter).

That's still quite a lot more than the cost of any other Railcard
(particularly if you're never actually going to get any Ryde-Ryde
travel for your 150 quid).

And Gold (and Network) card discounts only kick in after 10:00 M-F so
don't match the *9:30 off-peak start of Railcards and NR/Tfl.

Allow registration for W/E only ?

It's just that the USP of having a Travelcard Season on Oyster (and,
frankly, the reason why I went out of my way to get my Z1-5 on Oyster
rather than just buying a paper season from my local Southeastern
station) has always been that it's possible to extend its validity
using pre-pay (where valid, obviously) *without* having to plan in
advance and buy some sort of extension ticket. I accept that OEPs
have made a complete mockery of that advantage insofar as NR is
concerned, but we now have a situation where, at least off-peak, it is
*never* worthwhile for a Gold Card holder to use pre-pay to extend
their zones on NR, rather than buying a paper, discounted extension.
That seems entirely counter to the spirit of Oyster and the (semi-)
integrated zonal fare system, not to mention completely bonkers to an
outside observer.

Sorry, I'm really quite cross about this.