On 13 Dec, 20:40, "Paul Scott" wrote:

"Jonathan Stott" wrote:

For the first time in a while I made the journey from Bournemouth to
Brockenhurst in the daylight.

I noticed what appear to be some sort of gadgets stuck on top of a short
post that look suspiciously like touchpads for smartcards. I saw them next
to the entrances at New Milton, Hinton Admiral and Christchurch stations.

Is this the start of South West Trains' introduction of smartcards across
their franchise?

Yes - and once you start looking for them, the support pillars or wall
brackets and associated wiring conduit are visible in a lot of stations, I
even saw a couple of the readers on the Netley line this week; and you may
have noticed the new barriers at Southampton have integral 'Oyster like'
yellow pads. Fitters are also going around modifying the S&B TVMs that
aren't already fitted for smartcard readers (the rectangular knock out plate
to the right of the screen).


It's on then! Funny, I was thinking about whether SWT would sensibly
follow TfL's usage of a yellow 'touch-here' symbol for the smartcard
pads on ticket gates.

I haven't been following this that carefully lately - SWT's system
(and presumably all of those yet to come) will be to the ITSO
standard. Ticket gates in the London zones will of course also have to
accept Oyster (aka Philip's proprietary MiFare smartcards). IIRC the
DfT had agreed to fund work done by TfL to their Oyster readers on
ticket gates, on standalone validators (such as on the DLR) and on
buses to modify them so as to be able to read ITSO smartcards too - is
this still on? If it is that still leaves questions open as to the
extent of such modifications, i.e. whether they would just be capable
of checking for a valid season ticket/Travelcard or alternatively be
capable of more advanced functions such as ITSO pay-as-you-go journeys
etc.

I would hope it's the latter for several reasons, one of which being
that it'd would assist TfL if they decided to move the Oyster system
over from MiFare to ITSO smartcards (MiFare being partially
compromised, though it hasn't seemingly been holed below the
waterline, plus of course there's the issue that MiFare is single-
supplier.) I haven't read anything in particular to support this idea
but I have my suspicions that TfL might be tempted to make this switch
to ITSO at some point - which could lead to the benefit of 'National
Rail' smartcard products being loaded on new ITSO Oyster cards. This
would of course require modification or replacement of the very great
number of Oyster readers in ticket offices, ticket machines and shops
(the so called 'Oyster Ticket Stops', which have just been issued with
new kit - the 'Pearl' reader - is this ITSO compatible/easily
modifiable I wonder?).

Back to the imminent future - the new SWT smartcard readers on ticket
machines and in booking offices will presumably be ITSO only and hence
unable to deal with loading anything onto existing Oyster cards (or am
I wrong here?). Therefore I guess that some new symbol will have to be
devised for the smartcard readers on ticket machines, otherwise
holders of Oyster cards will end up trying to buy tickets or top-up
from machines which are incompatible. Going by the same logic I
suppose it would make some sense for the symbol to be a bit different
on non-London ticket gates in a probably doomed attempt to
differentiate them with Oyster (I can imagine people trying to use
Oyster PAYG from Guildford into London for example).


Of course there is no news as to what smart card functionality there will
be. If (like the current trial on the Reading line) it is for season tickets
only, there is not much point in readers at open stations...


Indeed - unless one could 'pick-up' a season ticket ordered online or
by phone by touching on the validator, or perhaps (ala Oyster) extend
a journey beyond the limits of the season ticket held. It would be
great if a straightforward pay-as-you-go functionality (again ala
Oyster) were to be implemented, but there are undeniably issues of
doing so on a network that has many ungated stations where it might be
misused/abused.