Tristán White wrote:
As I said a couple of weeks ago, I got on the LU at Old Street and was
going to Barking DLR.

I had a yearly season ticket on my Oystercard, validating me for all the
zones of the DLR and zones 1-3 on LU.

I used the barrier at Old Street.

I didn't use the swipe thingy on the Bank platform.

My ticket got checked while on the DLR, and his machine said that I was
illegally on the DLR; I was not happy as the machine wouldn't say that I
have a 1-3 season ticket on it so am eligible to go anywhere on the DLR.

He ********ed me and said he was going to issue me with a penalty fare, but
in the end believed my story. He said I should have swiped in at Bank as
their machines are independent from the data collected at Old Street.

What I don't know is whether you enter from the street level at Bank
itself, whether THOSE barriers are tied in with the ones on the platform.
Surely you wouldn't need to swipe there as well??? I don't know. The whole
system is screwed until Ken manages to get full control.

Regrettably, this isn't a Ken issue - TfL is in charge of ticketing on
LU and the DLR.

It sounds like you either had an intermittently broken Oyster or that
you encountered an RPI with an intermittently broken machine: whether
or not you touch in at the start of (or at any other point during) your
journey makes no difference whatsoever towards whether the Travelcard
loaded on your Oyster card is valid. Touching in is *only* relevant for
PAYG (although this obviously also includes travel outside of your
Travelcard zones, which is where confusion sometimes arises).

It also sounds like your RPI was an ignorant tit, although at least he
wasn't an ignorant tit who refused to back down when he was in the
wrong...

--
John Band
john at johnband dot org
www.johnband.org