On Apr 30, 12:06*pm, "David A Stocks" wrote:

"Barry Salter" wrote:
As has been reported in the past, the extension of Oyster PAYG to National
Rail will see an end to the current fixed maximum journey time of 2.5
hours for certain journeys. Instead, a *variable* maximum will be applied
when you touch out, based on the zones travelled through.

It looks like I might have benefited from this last week. My journey was
Brighton to Hanger Lane return, using my NR season as far as CLJ, then
Oyster PAYG via Shepherd's Bush. From CLJ:

I touched in on platform 16 at 10:34.

I touched out at SPB (NR) and almost then in on the Central line.

I touched out at Hanger Lane at about 11:10.

I then reversed the journey from Hanger Lane starting shortly after 13:00..
At CLJ I arrived on platform 2, and I had had got most of the way along the
footbridge when I realised I had forgotten to touch out. I went to platform
17 and touched out there at 13:59.

The weird part is that the online journey history only shows the 10:34 entry
at CLJ and the 13:59 exit at CLJ, total charge £1.80. I assume that if I had
spent longer at Hanger Lane it would have got split into two journeys - but
how long?


That doesn't make much sense to me at all. The total charge of £1.80
in particular is nonsensical - £1.80 isn't a fare band that currently
applies to PAYG journeys at all - see the fares table on page 5 of
this PDF:
http://www.tfl.gov.uk/assets/downloa...s-zones1-6.pdf

You should have been charged £2.20 overall - i.e. 2 x £1.10 fares
(there being an out-of-station interchange at Shepherd's Bush).

Normally when you do a trip such as that, when you exit the gates at
Hangar Lane then your first journey would be regarded as having
finished - even if you were to *immediately* re-enter the system
through the gates that would make no difference as it would be
regarded as the start of a new journey.

The only circumstance when this might be different is if you touch-out
on the standalone reader next to a manual gate (or touch-out on
standalone readers at a station without gates). Depending upon how the
standalone reader(s) is/are configured, it *may* be the case that if
you were then to try and touch-in after only a short period of time
then the original journey would be regarded as continuing.
(However I think this would only be the case if said reader(s) were
configured to provide 'soft' entries and exits - ala an interchange
reader - as opposed to one that was only configured to provide 'hard'
entries and exits to the system, as most readers on the DLR are
configured to do. I'm not sure how readers next to manual gates at LU
stations are configured).

However even if you touched-in/out on a standalone reader, then the
time that elapsed between you exiting Hangar Lane and then re-entering
the system there (i.e. almost two hours) is simply too long for any
such confusion to occur.

I therefore wonder if the journeys that you made have somehow become
entangled in the testing of this new 'variable journey time' system -
after all, the journey you made is a pretty standard one, and is not
one that this new system was really seeking to address (the original
maximum journey time used by the Oyster system was two hours).