On Tue, 15 Jul 2014 17:15:08 +0100, David Walters wrote:
On Tue, 15 Jul 2014 13:52:27 +0100, Paul Corfield wrote:
The big railway doesn't seem very ready for a proper launch yet. I was
ticket inspected on a train last week and the inspector didn't have a
way of checking my contactless card and although he had heard about the
pilot he had never actually seen a membership card before and didn't
know what they looked like. Felt a bit like waving psychic paper about.

While I haven't expended a lot of brain power on the issue I can't see
how contactless bank cards can be checked by any railway inspector. On
a bus the inspector obtains a print out from the driver's machine and
checks card numbers presented by passengers against the list. Given
you just tap your bank card on a reader on the rail network and there
is no "write" record on the bank card (AFAIK) then what is there to
check? The transaction data all goes to a "black box" for calculation
of fares and caps.

It's possible I have a knowledge gap about the card technology and
cards can be checked in some way that I'm unaware of.

Perhaps you can't tell by interrogating the card but you could log all
contactless cards that passengers claim to be using and then as part of
the overnight processing bill any cards that were checked by an inspector
but hadn't started a journey with a penalty fare.

I've just logged onto the Contactless website and there is now a 'Today's
Travel' section that appears new. Could the gates/validators now be
close enough to online and real-time that an inspector could have an
online reader that checks with a central database, provided you aren't
currently in a tunnel?