Finsbury Park to Harrow-on-the-Hill

Any chance of a photo of the ticket so I can pass it on?

 

Hi

A ticket to Zone 123456 is the same price. The person didn't buy the ticket at Finsbury Park so the ticket office was probably unfamiliar

 

Not too sure about Excess fares but a new poster is up in the mess room about Excess fares dated 19/10/2011 saying

The National Rail Conditions of Carriage requires a customer to buy or validate a pre-purchased ticket for their journey or pay any excess fare before boarding the train. If they do not, they are liable to be charged the full Anytime Single or Return fare for the journey being made. They will not receive Railcard or other discounts to which they would otherwise have been eligible.

and a link to "The Manual" but I don't have a password (not revenue dept). --- It logs on automatically I guess you don't need a password any more.... here you go

 

Sounds like a combination of FasTIS trying to be helpful and staff training (though tbh, I wouldn't generally expect staff 185 miles away to know the ins and outs of London zonal ticketing).

Finsbury Park to Zone U2345 is a perfectly valid ticket between Finsbury Park and Harrow...providing you change to the North London Line at Highbury, Jubilee at West Hampstead and Met at Wembley Park.

As has been pointed out, the correct ticket to issue for such a journey would be Finsbury Park to Zone U1245 provided the passenger in question had Safeguarded PRIV status. If they're a TOC New Entrant, it'd have to be an undiscounted ticket.

Cheers,

Barry

 

Why does the ticket have a maltese cross on it though? It isn't present in the fares database (well not in NFM09 anyway) and it would seem to be degrading the meaning of the little '+'; as I understand it it is meant to indicate that tickets are valid for a cross-London underground journey when the origin and destination are both national rail stations. But the fact the the destination is a "U-zone" should be all that is required to indicate the ticket is valid on LU.

And I don't know if this is mentioned anywhere else, but I got a ticket printed on some interesting new stock from the booking office at Oxford when I was in England last week. On the back (at the bottom, under the magnetic stripe) it says

Issued subject to National Rail Conditions of Carriage - see www.nationalrail.co.uk/nrcoc
'+' denotes ticket is valid for one journey across London by Underground/DLR services if required - for details see www.nationalrail.co.uk/crossinglondon. Information also available from staffed stations.

Does this maybe go along with adding "VIA" to route restrictions in ATOC's little attempt to make the information on tickets more comprehensible by passengers?

The codes underneath that are:
RSP No. 9599 4MAG 1211 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

 

It certainly is if using Oyster PAYG.

 

Some gems on that "Crossing London" page too:

Are ATOC trying to do away with the routeing guide? Not one mention of it on that page!

 

New Entrants can also buy the ticket as far as I know... never had a problem getting a Nantwich-London U1 priv return.

 

Not unless the NRCOC has changed very recently. Change of route and time restrictions are most definitely not required to be paid before travel.

Overdistance should be, but I'd question the Manual's implication that a the presence of a ticket machine means the customer must buy a new ticket for the full journey.

 

Our conductors only do what the instructions say to do! Charge the full single or return if able to get a ticket or excess before boarding

 

But is this a case of cross London transfer between two NR services, or just NR + LU? And does this make any difference?

 

Just because you've never had a problem getting it doesn't make it valid. Hence Condition 6 on this year's TOCNE card. The exception mentioned there being for things like Wembley Stadium to Lewisham, where a cross-London transfer is included.

Going back to the OP for a minute, I've just put Finsbury Park to Harrow in FasTIS and it intially offered me Zone U12 to Harrow-on-the-Hill at £8.50 PRIV. Bringing up the full list of fares adds Finsbury Park to U1256 (both Any Permitted and via LU/DLR) and Finsbury Park to U1245 (via LU/DLR) amongst others.

Cheers,

Barry

 

It seems to me to determine which one of these zonal fares is appropriate, you need to look at a London Underground map and check which zones the proposed route to the destination passes through. Is that correct? As there is no routeing guide for LU I don't think it can be worked out automatically by the TIS?

 

That's correct, though the TfL Journey Planner displays what zones a given journey passes through, which comes in handy at times.

Cheers,

Barry

 

Thanks; that's really helpful and interesting to know. In my spare time I'm working on a software library to do fares queries and one of the areas I was getting stuck with was determining which zonal fares to offer for a journey from a NR station to a LU station. I did think at first that to offer the one that passes through the least zones would be a good rule of thumb. E.g. for a journey from Reading to Notting Hill Gate you'd only offer the Zone U1 fare. It sounds like this is what FasTIS does by default.

But that approach is only fool proof if you are changing to LU at a central London terminal and thus always starting the LU portion of the journey in Zone 1. You could also get from Reading to Notting Hill Gate by changing at Ealing Broadway to the central line and using a ticket to Zone U123 routed "Ealing Common/West Acton". I can't work out a foolproof way to automatically show only appropriate zonal fares, so I think showing them all is the only real option.

It appears to me that this is one aspect of the fares database that has completely escaped any attempts to integrate it with journey planning engines and still seems to be stuck in the manual days of the 1980s.

 

Notting Hill Gate is dual zoned, so would Zone U23 be appropriate/available?