In message , at 23:51:45 on Thu, 4 Aug 2016,
bob remarked:
"In the autumn, keyGo will extend to stations in London and all of
its Great Northern and Thameslink routes - providing coverage from
Brighton to Huntingdon."

A nice bit of doublespeak there - last time I looked the GN route
went all the way to Peterborough. So when they say "all GN and
Thameslink routes" they mean "... but only at stations we can be
arsed to equip, thus breaking one of our franchise commitments".

surely the problem with Peterborough is having to avoid the problem of
people using Main line trains and then toughing out as if they have
used a stopping train (which I believe attracts a lower fare)

No, it's because Peterborough is an East Coast managed station and
GTR haven't sorted out integrating their readers with the gateline.

Same problem as Cambridge where the majority of 10m annual passengers use
GTR trains but AGA run the station and only handle their own smartcard and
m-ticket technologies.

And there was me thinking that ticketing was one bit that wasn't meant to be
so fragmented after privatisation.

I thought the whole idea behind ITSO cards and technology was to avoid
precisely this issue. Where did it all go wrong?

Two problems, quite different.

The one about stations: having gated them you have to attach ITSO pads
to them. That took TfL long enough just to allow ITSO season ticket
holders passage. Unless I've missed it I don't think TfL and their
national rail partners have got their head around ITSO pay as you go yet
on routes with ticket interavailability.

Secondly, interoperability: this is much more fundamental to the ITSO
concept. In theory I should be able to load a Scotrail ITSO ticket onto
a whatever Southern's "the Key" is called this week, but there isn't
even interoperability amongst (eg) ITSO cards in different bits of the
Stagecoach empire, let alone on trips using more than one franchise's
trains.
--
Roland Perry