On Wed, 10 Sep 2014 08:14:18 +0100, Roland Perry wrote:
In message , at 23:44:13 on
Tue, 9 Sep 2014, David Walters remarked:
And with Oyster there's at least the chance that you can see your
balance disappearing, if you know exactly where to look on a gate for
the fraction of a second it displays the number. I'm quite sure there's
no such facility for the contactless cards.

I'm a member of the contactless pilot and on my journey home this
evening both gates gave me red lights while opening

What is the significance of a red light - it sounds like a "reject" (but
never underestimate the ability of hardware designers to mix their
metaphors).

It is a reject and I wouldn't expect the gates to open with a red light,
rather than green, but they did. I thought I'd had a red light about
a week ago but hadn't been sure but last night I'm fairly sure that is
what happened.

I was using wide gates that were set for entry and exit and seem to
alternate between directions every second or so and perhaps the red light
was due to the card read time being slow and it switching directions
while reading but then opening because the read was successful?

but the exit gate also displayed my fare. I've just checked the online
version and that is matching what I expected to pay and what was shown
on the gate.

I'm not really sure how that happened.

If the gates are online to the "back office" it could be possible to
calculate and display the fare since the last 'touch', but this isn't
the same as a running total for the day.

I think another number was displayed in the space I would expect to see
remaining Oyster balance but I didn't get a proper look and was surprised
to see anything at all.

The journey was unusual for me as I normally start or end at a station
without gates and use a validator. I did that this morning and the exit
gate didn't display a fare.

I'll have to look more closely
at the displays next time and perhaps try and get a picture.

Wouldn't you need two people for that?

I just need two hands, not to be carrying anything and the station to
be not too busy.