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Chiltern and Oyster
Thanks to Matthew, a poster on another thread, my attention has been
drawn to the following announcement by Chiltern Railways - I will copy and paste for the sake of the record: From http://www.chilternrailways.co.uk/content.php?nID=4&ID=237 -------------------- We are the first to sell the complete TfL Oyster range Date: 09 Jan 2007 16:12 Award-winning Chiltern Railways is the first train company in the United Kingdom to sell the complete range of Transport for London smartcard products at their main London Marylebone station. Passengers can now purchase all products including Pay As You go Oyster for the London Underground and has sold their first annual Oyster card on Fastis, new booking office ticket machines. Commercial Director Neil Micklethwaite said: "We have worked very closely with Transport for London, ATOC and our ticket machine suppliers, Cubic Transportation Systems to bring this facility to London Marylebone station. "Previously passengers could wait up to 15 minutes to purchase an annual season ticket from booking offices but through making our new machines Oyster compatible we have increased this service dramatically. "It has cost us an additional £120,000 to make our Fastis machines at London Marylebone compatible with Oyster and we can even sell Pay As You Go to London Underground passengers. "Fastis machines, located in all of our booking offices, speeds up face-to-face ticket sales by 50%. Chiltern Railways has recently upgraded their booking office ticket machines to Fastis with an £800,000 investment, and were the first to to sell an annual season ticket. "We are also happy to announce that we are working very hard with Transport for London on being the first train company to sell Oyster Smartcards outside London. We will be launching this to our passengers in 2007," he said. Brian Cooke, Chairman of London TravelWatch said "We are delighted that passengers at Marylebone station will be able to purchase and recharge their Oyster cards there. We hope other train operators will soon follow the excellent lead set by Chiltern Railways." -------------------- This is basically two separate bits of news about Chiltern and Oyster. In the main it concerns the fact that Chiltern can now retail the full range of Oyster ticketing products at their Marylebone ticket office (1) - apparently the first TOC to be able to do so. It also states that Chiltern will sell Oyster outside London (2). Whilst these two things are to an extent interconnected I'll deal with them separately. (1) Chiltern's claim to be the first TOC selling the complete range of Oyster ticketing products does seem like a bit odd. I thought that certain National Rail (NR) stations already sold Oyster - specifically stations that were served by LU, such as the many Silverlink stations served by the Bakerloo line, plus others such as Richmond (managed by SWT), New Cross Gate (Southern) and New Cross (Southeastern). Ticket offices at these stations are able to top-up Oyster PAYG credit, and I presumed they could also sell the whole range of Travelcard season tickets - at Kensington Olympia, when buying a weekly Travelcard fairly recently I was certainly asked whether I would like it on Oyster or on a printed ticket. Perhaps these stations aren't able to issue monthly and/or annual Travelcards on Oyster? Or perhaps the way they issue/recharge Oyster cards is through the use of separate equipment, similar to that used by a newsagent, so this is the first time that Oyster issuing functions have been fully integrated into the ticket issuing equipment. That said, it doesn't look like any of the stations that already issue/recharge Oyster have the same green Oyster ticket machine kit as used by newsagents; also, at Kensington Olmypia, the Oyster pad appears to have been attached to the old APTIS ticket machine (something like this one [1] - BTW it's still in use this past week, I'm sure it'll be replaced very soon). Perhaps when these stations sell Travelcards on Oyster it is merely as if they're an agent for TfL (akin to a newsagent) rather than selling the ticket directly 'themselves', if you see what I mean - i.e. when they sell a monthly/annual Travelcard on Oyster the sale is credited directly to Chiltern and the passengers details appear in Chiltern's database. I don't know. All in all, as you can probably gather, I'm unconvinced by Chiltern's claim to be "the first train company in the UK to sell the complete range of TfL smartcard [i.e. Oyster] products". (2) Chiltern are "working hard" with TfL to sell Oyster outside London. I'm sure I've also read here on utl that 'one' have similar plans. I'm intrigued as to what this will actually mean. I see two possibilities... * Chiltern will merely sell season tickets on Oyster (whether they be season tickets with inclusive Travelcards to London, or indeed a season ticket for any journey on their route). This would not really be any different to the present situation, the only change being the medium on which the ticket is held - i.e. electronically on Oyster as opposed to on paper. Given that there's no benefit in doing such a thing (apart from making it a bit easier to get through the gates) this seems unlikely, though still possible. * The second and far more revolutionary change would involve Oyster being implemented for Pay-as-you-go use _outside_ the London zones. How this might work is a fascinating prospect... ~ How many Chiltern stations would it cover, all of them, or just those closer to London? ~ How would it work in relation to daily price capping - would journeys outside of the zonal area merely be charged separately whilst normal capping would apply within the zones, or would there be a special 'Chiltern daily cap' that might apply if several out-of-zone Chiltern journeys were made? ~ Would Chiltern operate their own zonal system, a bit like zones A-D on the Metropolitan line? ~ How would any Chiltern implementation of Oyster work with that implemented on other TOCs such as 'one', or would they retain totally separate Oyster fare regimes? If anyone does know anything more specific about this development I'd be most interested to hear it. ----- [1] http://therailticketgallery.fotopic.net/p2224852.html |
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