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

Mizter T ) gurgled happily, sounding much like they were
saying :

~ Would Chiltern operate their own zonal system, a bit like zones A-D
on the Metropolitan line?

And there you touch on one possible reason they've done this... that they
already accept Oyster PAYG on the gates at Marylebone, because PAYG is
valid on the Aylesbury via Amersham route as far as Amersham.

Adrian wrote:

Mizter T ) gurgled happily, sounding much like they were
saying :

~ Would Chiltern operate their own zonal system, a bit like zones A-D
on the Metropolitan line?

And there you touch on one possible reason they've done this... that they
already accept Oyster PAYG on the gates at Marylebone, because PAYG is
valid on the Aylesbury via Amersham route as far as Amersham.

I forgot to mention that Chiltern does indeed accept Oyster PAYG from
Amersham (zone D) into Marylebone. However I'd suggest that this is
because it shares the route with the LU Metropolitan line, and British
Rail / Chiltern Railways and LU tickets have always (well, not always,
but for a good while) been interavailable between Amersham and
Marylebone/Baker Street - i.e. you can use the ticket of one company on
the services of the other. I should add that I don't know the detailed
history of this ticketing interavailability!

Therefore, if Oyster PAYG is a form of LU ticketing it is thus
available for use on Chiltern. All that said, Oyster PAYG is available
from West and South Ruislip to Marylebone, whilst printed LU tickets
_do_not_ have interavailable validity on this route. So Chiltern have
obviously come to some sort of deal with LU here.

Indeed I guess that Chiltern have a more extensive deal with LU
regarding Oyster PAYG. AIUI the way revenue sharing works under printed
tickets on the shared Chiltern/Met section is that whoever sells the
ticket keeps the cash. I suspect that there's a slightly more
sophisticated formula when it comes to revenue sharing from Oyster PAYG
journeys, as such a scheme wouldn't really make sense.

But I agree with your underlying point - Chiltern are already familiar
with Oyster PAYG, and already have a close working relationship with
LU, which has meant they are more amenable, enthusiastic even, about
the prospect of extending the Oyster system to work elsewhere on their
routes than other TOCs are. That said, I await to see whether they are
actually interested in using Oyster PAYG outside the zones, or whether
they just wish to issue their season tickets in the form of Oyster -
which wouldn't count as any great shakes in my book.

~ How many Chiltern stations would it cover, all of them, or just those
closer to London?

TfL have aspirations to introduce Oyster PAYG as far as High Wycombe,
and possibly Princes Risborough / Aylesbury:

http://www.tfl.gov.uk/rail/downloads...dary_May06.pdf

Dorridge to Stourbridge will be covered by Centro's smartcard:

http://www.centro.org.uk/source/WMPT...March_2006.htm

Chiltern's aims for London - Birmingham journeys seem to be focusing on
e-tickets and mobile tickets, which just leaves Dorridge/Stratford -
High Wycombe, which i can't see much effort being devoted to.

On 12 Jan 2007 13:20:16 -0800, "Matthew Dickinson"
wrote:

TfL have aspirations to introduce Oyster PAYG as far as High Wycombe,
and possibly Princes Risborough / Aylesbury:

http://www.tfl.gov.uk/rail/downloads...dary_May06.pdf

Interesting. For me such a feature would avoid the curious hard-coded
route I'm sold the occasional times I take the train that way -
Central line "via S [or W] Ruislip" which can involve 50min wait in
the relevant Ruislip if the sales office has miscalculated arrival
times in the transfer station onto a Chiltern. PAYG would be an
improvement, and would be a welcome reversal of the TOCs' bad habits
of selling inflexible tickets for high prices.

Not sure letting Livingstone loose beyond is a good idea though...
--
Old anti-spam address cmylod at despammed dot com appears broke
So back to cmylod at bigfoot dot com

Mizter T wrote:
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

snip

What I want to know is why the opportunity to equip Wembley Stadium with
Oyster validators and ticket machines was not taken during that
station's reconstruction. It seems like such an obvious thing to do that
there must be some reason why it was not done.

In reply to news post, which Mizter T wrote on Fri,
12 Jan 2007 -
Adrian wrote:
I forgot to mention that Chiltern does indeed accept Oyster PAYG from
Amersham (zone D) into Marylebone. However I'd suggest that this is
because it shares the route with the LU Metropolitan line, and British
Rail / Chiltern Railways and LU tickets have always (well, not always,
but for a good while) been interavailable between Amersham and
Marylebone/Baker Street - i.e. you can use the ticket of one company on
the services of the other. I should add that I don't know the detailed
history of this ticketing interavailability!


From the early 20th century the line from just past Finchley Road to
beyond Aylesbury was a joint line original operated by the Metropolitan
Railway and Great Central Railway. This joint arrangement has existed
in one form or another since then and the various organisations /
companies that succeeded the original joint operators have taken part.
Tickets have always been inter changeable. The pricing of tickets out
to Amersham follows the LU zonal structure, I would suggest the prices
of tickets out to Wycombe are not comparable, they seem more expensive
to me!


--
Matthew P Jones
www.ThisIsAmersham.com www.amersham.org.uk www.metroland.org.uk
Don't reply directly it will not be read. You can reply to knap AT Nildram then dot co then dot uk

Matthew P Jones wrote:
The pricing of tickets out to Amersham follows the LU zonal
structure, I would suggest the prices of tickets out to Wycombe are
not comparable, they seem more expensive to me!

Absolutely. It was only about fifteen years ago that the Aylesbury to
Marylebone fare was standardised for both routes. Prior to that, tickets
between Aylesbury and Marylebone via Wycombe were dearer than via Amersham
(although, IIRC, monthly or longer seasons were accepted on both routes).

In article ,
(TheOneKEA) wrote:

Mizter T wrote:
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

snip

What I want to know is why the opportunity to equip Wembley Stadium
with Oyster validators and ticket machines was not taken during
that station's reconstruction. It seems like such an obvious thing
to do that there must be some reason why it was not done.

The ITSO standards problem? The agreement that Oyster can co-exist with
ITSO-standard smartcards is quite recent.

--
Colin Rosenstiel

Colin Rosenstiel wrote:
In article ,
(TheOneKEA) wrote:

Mizter T wrote:
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
snip

What I want to know is why the opportunity to equip Wembley Stadium
with Oyster validators and ticket machines was not taken during
that station's reconstruction. It seems like such an obvious thing
to do that there must be some reason why it was not done.

The ITSO standards problem? The agreement that Oyster can co-exist with
ITSO-standard smartcards is quite recent.


I doubt it - Chiltern's services are so entangled with Oyster now that
it seems strange for them to hold out in such a fashion.

At the very least, I would suspect that there would be problems
expanding the current ad-hoc PAYG agreement for West/South
Ruislip-Marylebone to include Wembley Stadium, as AFAIK LU paper tickets
comparable to PAYG fares are NOT valid for that journey.

Considering the earbashing Chiltern gets about their lack of trains at
the Sudbury stations, making up for it by allowing Oyster PAYG travel to
and from Wembley Stadium (and later, maybe Northolt Park) would have
helped somewhat. Besides, the PR opportunity would surely be useful
("Chiltern Railways is first TOC to fully embrace Oyster").