In message , at 21:14:48 on
Wed, 17 Sep 2014, Paul Corfield remarked:
I suspect the main issue is how, if people set up accounts on line,
TfL can possibly verify that someone saying they have a Railcard
actually does have one. I doubt there is any system to system link
between TfL and whatever system RSP have for railcards (if they even
have one!).

The way round that at present is that you physically present yourself
and your entitlement and a ticket clerk enters all the relevant
details. With a move to scrap ticket offices there has to be some way
of adding entitlement - and yes I know that is via a roving member of
staff logging on to a passenger machine and doing what the ticket
clerk currently does! However is anyone going to want to show a bank
card to a staff member to punch in to a ticket machine? I guess
someone could, at the relevant point in the process, stick their card
in the card reader so details are transferred electronically but it
all seems a dreadful faff.

The discount will be recorded on your TfL CPC online account. All that's
required is for you to present your Railcard to a member of staff, and
then have him record your card number on some manual handheld device. At
the end of the day transfer those numbers to the central system.

More elegantly, do one of these zero-pence "sales", but this time for a
"Railcard entitlement", which only the member of staff has the ability
to call up on the ticket machine.

I suspect discount entitlements will not move across to CPCs at all.
They'll remain on Oyster and later "dumb" Oyster with TfL simply
migrating the vast majority of entitlements as part of a card
"switchover" process when current Oyster is decommissioned (Phase 5 of
the Future Ticketing Project).

That sounds like you expect the Oyster entitlements *will* be migrated,
or am I misreading?
--
Roland Perry