Mark²³ wrote:

Just been online to top-up my Oyster Card. You can now sign up for Auto
Top-up, which will automatically top-up your card by the amount you
choose, whenever your card falls below £5.

Better yet, there is a £10 discount for the first 10,000 users who sign
up. I just got £20 for £10.

Hope this is not "old news" to you guys; but I thought some might be
interested.

No, AFAIA the fact that Oyster auto top-up has gone live is fresh news
to this newsgroup, though thanks to the detective work by Matthew
Dickinson in a uk.t.l thread back in July (linked to below - see [1])
the auto top-up system was seen to be coming over the horizon.

I've just logged in and had a look at how the auto top-up system will
work. Here's a few points.


- To set up auto top-up, you need to purchase at least £20 worth of
PrePay - regardless of what your Oyster Pre-Pay balance is. TfL says
(with reason) this is so "TfL [can] verify that the card details
provided by you for Auto top-up payments are accepted by your financial
institution".

- The amount for the auto top-up can be set at either £20 or £40, but
not at any other amount.

- Once you've set-up the auto topup on the web, you need to pass
through your nominated station once to pick up your Pre-Pay and the
'Auto top-up instruction' from the automatic gate (or Oyster reader at
ungated stations). Just to be clear - this is an electronic instruction
to your Oyster card, not an instruction you'll need to take from anyone
on person!

- Then, and this is the amazing bit, your Oyster card will then be
automatically topped up whenever it's below £5 and when you touch it
on a card reader (i.e. by going through an automatic gate, or by
touching on a reader at an ungated station) at *any* Tube or DLR
station - i.e. auto topup won't be consigned to happening at a single
nominated station, it'll happen whenever it's needed anywhere across
the Tube or DLR networks.

- Auto top-up won't work when passing through National Rail gatelines
on routes where Pre-Pay is valid (e.g. it won't work at Liverpool
Street station).

- And - and this'll surely rile some people here - auto top-up can't be
picked up from a Tube ticket machine, you'll have to actually touch-in
to travel the Tube/DLR in order for it to work.

I presume that the auto top-up system will kick in as needed when the
balance falls below £5 regardless of whether that is at beginning of a
journey, when touching in, or at the end of a journey when touching
out.

There's a load of new section of Q&A's on the Ask Oyster website, to go
straight Q&A's relating to auto top-up follow this link:
http://snipurl.com/AskOyster_autotopup

IMHO the auto top-up system is a positive development in the new age of
smart ticketing, even if we're only at the semi-smart stage so far.


[1]
http://groups.google.co.uk/group/uk....0d37ea3aa320c4