Avoiding disgraceful TfL fares (legally!)

[yorkie]

Particularly useful for railcard holders!

If you don't live in London, but need to use the tube, there are plenty of ways to ensure TfL don't get their hands on (much of) your cash!

1) get a (good old paper!) travelcard from your origin station.

Not available? Not a problem! Re-book somewhere along the route!

Example: York to all zones. Doesn't exist. Re-book at Newark, Grantham or Peterborough (depending on stopping patern). This saves me £15 per trip!

2) if you need to get from one terminal to another (e.g. King's Cross to Waterloo) get a ticket like Finsbury Park to Clapham Junction. This includes tube travel at a much cheaper price! Especially for Railcard Holders!

3) If you live in London, get a (good old paper!) travelcard from an NR station.

Need advice on boycotting them? Feel free to contact me.

 

[Techniquest]

Got to ask, how does buying a travelcard outside of London make things cheaper, and avoids giving TfL much of your money?

I still say Oyster is, for buses, trams and LUL, awesome. Z1 single £1.50 with an Oyster, a mammoth £3 for cash! When it covers all of NR within the zones, it'll be excellent. For the time being, I'll stick to buying myself (when possible) a Zones 1-6 TC, from an NR ticket machine (those old ones at Paddington are brilliant!), which cost around £4.90 with a Y-P. Awesome value there, fair play.

 

[yorkie]

Got to ask, how does buying a travelcard outside of London make things cheaper, and avoids giving TfL much of your money?

I still say Oyster is, for buses, trams and LUL, awesome. Z1 single £1.50 with an Oyster, a mammoth £3 for cash! When it covers all of NR within the zones, it'll be excellent. For the time being, I'll stick to buying myself (when possible) a Zones 1-6 TC, from an NR ticket machine (those old ones at Paddington are brilliant!), which cost around £4.90 with a Y-P. Awesome value there, fair play.

If you live outside London, it is considerably cheaper to get a travelcard-inclusive ticket from outside the zones, especially for railcard holders. See the topic posted in General NR by Chris M for examples of this.

Z1 single? I'd never, ever get one, for reasons posted above!

 

[Techniquest]

Depends. If you simply needed to get from Kings Cross to Waterloo in a hurry, going one way only, having forgotten to buy your TC/Tube-inclusive fare beforehand, not having time to queue at the ticket offices, I think you'd probably consider it. But hey, maybe not.

EDIT: Buying a Z1 single, especially using Oyster, is considerably quicker than buying a TC. If your Oyster is already topped up, it's so much easier to go down to the platforms, put your card on the reader (not even a need to withdraw it from its wallet!), walk through the barrier and voila. Much easier than queuing up at a machine for TC/single/return ticket, walking down, putting the ticket through the machine, taking it back, putting it safely away in a chilled pocket (anyone who was with me on that last trip I put my TC in my warm pocket will recall it faded away very quickly!) and walking onto the platform. But that's just me I guess. I love my Oyster for one-way Z1 trips. Naturally, if I'm on a 12-hour bash around London, I'd get a paper 6-zone TC for the time being, until they become valid in the same way on Oyster for all routes.

 

[evil_hippo]

Thing is, with PrePay I don't have to decide how many zones I wish to use before travelling. On two consecutive trips before I go my oyster I bought a z1-6 and a z1-4 day travelcard respetively and never left zoner 1 the first time and zone 2 the first time. I could have therefore made a considerable saving had I simply reached the appropriate cap on PrePay, as I do now. On a recent occasion all I needed was one tube journey, so I saved £1.50 using oyster and avoided the horrendous KX ticket ques (even for the machines). There is the final perk of course: I just can't get over how easily you get the tube barriers open with an oyster.

 

[yorkie]

But Zone 1-4 and 1-6 are the same price for you (with a YP) aren't they? So where's the saving?

 

[Guinness]

Trouble is with more people "boycoting" TfL then the more TfL will put up fares, very annoying for people who live in London. I can picture the Evening Standard headlines already.

 

[Jonno2055]

Travel cards are £9.50 for me but by coinsidence so are returns to liverpool street but that doesn't include the tube so I save quite a bit when I go to London.

Travel cards cover all zones in london so to save money if you are traveling into LOndon but then decide to go back out for example to Woking then I would:

Get a travelcard from witham to london then to get to Woking I would purchase a ticket from subiton which is on the zone six boundary, instead of buying a ticket from Waterloo, actually gives me a saving of five pounds. Of course you could buy a CDR from witham to Woking but if you just go into London but decide to go out gain to another place to see something then it works. In some cases actually doing it this way is cheaper than a CDR.

 

[yorkie]

Trouble is with more people "boycoting" TfL then the more TfL will put up fares, very annoying for people who live in London. I can picture the Evening Standard headlines already.

They've already bumped up fares as much as they can get away with.

A few people boycotting them won't really make much difference in terms of money, it's a moral statement more than anything.

Travel cards are £9.50 for me but by coinsidence so are returns to liverpool street but that doesn't include the tube so I save quite a bit when I go to London.

Yep, in your case the travelcard add-on is zero! Not bad.

Get a travelcard from witham to london then to get to Woking I would purchase a ticket from subiton which is on the zone six boundary, instead of buying a ticket from Waterloo, actually gives me a saving of five pounds. Of course you could buy a CDR from witham to Woking but if you just go into London but decide to go out gain to another place to see something then it works. In some cases actually doing it this way is cheaper than a CDR.

Yes it is cheaper and worth doing, but get a ticket from "Boundary Zone 6" rather than Surbiton! You can then get non-stop trains.

Oh, the memories of those non-stop CIGs rattling along at 90mph in the summer of 2004 have come flooding back. Those were the days!!!

 

[Techniquest]

Even I'm annoyed at having not done more slammers! Tis nice to be able to add Horsham to Barnham and onto Bognor Regis as Rateable Traction on my map. If only I could remember all of my slammer trips!

 

[evil_hippo]

Problem is I don't believe you can get add-ons with virgin value and you certainly can't get one with a bargain berth, my two main ways of travelling to London.

 

[yorkie]

Problem is I don't believe you can get add-ons with virgin value and you certainly can't get one with a bargain berth, my two main ways of travelling to London.

True.

Support your local station and get a travelcard from them