Barry Salter wrote:

Mizter T wrote:

I also guess NR don't issue such YPR-discounted Travelcards as zones
A-D is LU territory, which is a shame. It's also possible to buy from
NR ticket offices a _non-discounted_ Day Travelcard that covers zones
A-D - see section L of the NR National Fares Manual (page L1 [2]) - but
seemingly you can only do this for the off-peak Fay Travelcard, not the
peak version.


Au contraire. It's entirely possible for an NR Ticket Office to issue a
Travelcard including A-D [1] by doing it as if you'd bought it *from*
Amersham. [2]

It was covered in an issue of Newsrail Express, but said issue appears
to be no longer on the ATOC website.

HTH,

Barry


You've missed my point! You have however raised some other issues I'd
like to comment on. I'll start by clarifying things.

[Pages numbers quoted refer to Section L or F of the NFM].

(1) What I was trying to get across is this - when you buy a railcard
discounted Day Travelcard (YPR or any of the other railcards) what you
get depends on where you bought it:

* Buy at an NR ticket office and you'll get a plain-vanilla zones 1-6
off-peak Day Travelcard.

* Buy at an Underground ticket office and you'll get a zones 1-D
off-peak Day Travelcard - i.e. LU chucks in zones A-D for _free_.

Contributors to utl and uk.railway have stated many times that this is
LU's modus operandi - for example see this 2006 thread [1].

Bizarrely ATOC's publicity for some railcards wrongly denies it's even
possible to buy a railcard-discounted Day Travelcard from an LU ticket
office - see the FAQ answers on the YPR, Family Railcard and Senior
Railcard websites [2] - similar text is included in the T&Cs in the
leaflets for those railcards.


(2) Page L1 details "Through Fares to LU Met Line Stations Outside the
London Fare Zones Area".

The add-on to the off-peak Day Travelcard price of £1.10 makes sense -
it's the difference between the price of a Z1-6 Travelcard (£ 6.30)
and a Z1-D Travelcard (£7.40).

_But_ tickets are issued as point-to-point CDRs - so someone who wanted
to visit several stations in Zones A-D (for example go for a walk
between Amersham and Chesham, or visit both Amersham and Watford)
couldn't do this with an NR point-to-point ticket. Thus they;d get a
less flexible ticket than if they'd purchased a Zones A-D Day
Travelcard from an LU ticket office.

Also it's unclear to me whether a railcard holder could get any
discount on an NR-issued Day Travelcard with an add-on CDR to Chesham.
_If_ it was possible would it be a discounted £4.80 Day Travelcard
plus a discounted CDR at 75p (i.e. third off £1.10) equalling £5.55?
Or would it just be a third off £7.40, so £4.95. (I'm not sure how
rail fares are rounded up or down so apols for any minor errors there).

Given that page K1.8 states "Railcard discounts do not apply to these
LU only tickets" so it appears the above scenarios are not possible.

Even if either was possible, it would still be more expensive than the
railcard reduced Zones 1-D Day Travelcard issued by LU, price £4.80 -
where Zones A-D are thrown in for free.


(3) Ignoring the issue of railcard reductions it would be much easier
if NR ticket offices were just able to issue straightforward Zones 1-D
Day Travelcards. Page K1.7, which is concerned with how to issue zonal
extensions to Travelcard holders, bizarrely re-categorises Zones A-D as
Zones 7-10! It really doesn't have to be this complicated!


(4) The language used on pages K1.3 and K1.4, section K of the NFM is,
I think, a little unclear. Under the "Out-Boundary" heading of the peak
and off-peak Day Travelcard sections it states "Tickets are also
available from the following LU stations on the Met Line at the
following prices: [...]".

To the uninitiated this almost suggests that a passenger can only buy
these tickets from the listed Met Line stations. Of course this is
wrong as any NR ticket office can issue a ticket from any other station
on the network - nonetheless I wouldn't necessarily see the harm in
including a sentence making this explicit. That said, the NFM is an
internal document and I suppose it's written on the presumption that
staff who consult it shouldn't need to be reminded of such things.


[1] Unless you want one with a Y-P or Forces Discount, it's a weekday,
and they're using FasTIS, as it erroneously applies the £8 Minimum Fare


Something that should IMO be corrected ASAP.