Fare question - passing through gate lines twice at a station

[Lockwood]

I had a recent trip to London.
The journey was Ealing Broadway to Liverpool Street (direct Elizabeth Line)
St Paul's to Ealing Broadway, via TCR. The signed route taking us up, through a gate, through a huge queue into another gate and back down. (Grr)

My card shows £6.60 for the day.
My wife says her card was charged £3 more.

I have tried to access my online journey history, but the tfl website says it isn't available at the moment.

Looking at the fare finder, it looks like her card has been charged for St Paul's to TCR £3 and then TCR to Ealing Broadway £3.30?

Same card.

Is there a maximum amount of time you are allowed for passing between gate lines? I'm not sure what was going on, but it felt like it took several minutes to shuffle through the Elizabeth Line queue to the gate. If so, we must have been right on it for one of us to be within it and one outside of it?

 

[swt_passenger]

I had a recent trip to London.
The journey was Ealing Broadway to Liverpool Street (direct Elizabeth Line)
St Paul's to Ealing Broadway, via TCR. The signed route taking us up, through a gate, through a huge queue into another gate and back down. (Grr)

My card shows £6.60 for the day.
My wife says her card was charged £3 more.

I have tried to access my online journey history, but the tfl website says it isn't available at the moment.

Looking at the fare finder, it looks like her card has been charged for St Paul's to TCR £3 and then TCR to Ealing Broadway £3.30?

Same card.

Is there a maximum amount of time you are allowed for passing between gate lines? I'm not sure what was going on, but it felt like it took several minutes to shuffle through the Elizabeth Line queue to the gate. If so, we must have been right on it for one of us to be within it and one outside of it?

There is a set time, there’s a list on the Oyster Fares website run by forum member @MikeWh - this is what’s referred to as an out of station interchange, (OSI). At Tottenham Court Rd the time appears to be 10 mins, although it’s described as Central/Northern I think it includes the EL as well.

 

[Lockwood]

I didn't time how long we were stuck on that concourse for, but it might not be beyond the realms of reason...

So my wife got charged £3 for being a few seconds slower than me to go through a crowd. Amazing.

 

[ainsworth74]

Probably one of those ones where if you phone the Oyster helpline they'll be able to refund the extra fare. Frustrating though for sure!

 

[swt_passenger]

Is there a paid side interchange route between Central line and Elizabeth line at the west end of the Central platforms? Might be worth considering if doing the journey again…

 

[MikeWh]

Probably one of those ones where if you phone the Oyster helpline they'll be able to refund the extra fare. Frustrating though for sure!

Have you looked at the times on the two journey history statements? If the double charge one is 10 minutes then I'm sure that the helpdesk will adjust the charge. You may not be the only one complaining if it was down to a long queue.

 

[Haywain]

I have tried to access my online journey history, but the tfl website says it isn't available at the moment.

Sounds like it's your wife's journey history that needs to be checked. The TfLGo app will show what has been charged for, and the website will show all of the touches.

 

[Lockwood]

Sounds like it's your wife's journey history that needs to be checked. The TfLGo app will show what has been charged for, and the website will show all of the touches.

Yes, but before getting her to sign up for that, I wanted to check my history so that I could see if I was missing anything, and to be able to describe the way through the system.

And the site wasn't saying anything about my account, just that the site was unavailable. Maybe it was a maintenance window.


I thought there was a paid side interchange, I remember the massive bit of the station that was capped off during the construction. But the signed route took us up and down which I found odd, but really didn't have the mental energy to do anything other than follow the route

 

[MikeWh]

I've just logged into my account on the website, so everything ought to be available now.

 

[Lockwood]

Yeah, I was able to get in when I went to get the error message. I'm showing a 3 minute gap at TCR. It certainly felt longer!

 

[MikeWh]

I'm showing a 3 minute gap at TCR. It certainly felt longer!

That is quite surprising. If you can get your wife to sign up and get hers it should show what has happened.

Scenario 1: The system has failed to join the journeys together.
Scenario 2: One of the 4 gates used has a clock which is either fast or slow.

Either way the helpdesk will almost certainly adjust the charges. If a gate is that far out timewise they ought to pass it to the engineers to reset.

 

[njr001]

If your wife's card is not registered you can add it to your account. My partner can't be bothered to chase TFL to correct 'anomalies' so I have two Oyster cards (with railcard discounts) linked to my account.Helpdesk have no problem correcting either card.

 

[Lockwood]

Hmm... Interesting, I just checked mine again.

The first journey had a funny icon on it, went in to it and saw it was showing as an incomplete journey so assumed to be Ealing Broadway to St Paul's.

Stranger and stranger - I did tap out at Liverpool Street.


Edit: And I refreshed after it said there was an error, the icon went away, and the correct journey is showing again. Which I think is what I saw earlier, because I thought I would have noticed the wrong journey!

Edit 2: Wife's card has an auto generated journey from St Paul's to Leicester Square, then TCR to Ealing "to avoid a maximum fare". Seems an odd journey for the system to do?

 

[MikeWh]

Take some screenshots of this journey history if you can. Something is going on.

 

[Lockwood]

Went to take the screenshots of my card, and it did it again!

 

[mickey]

The other possibility is that one of the cards didn’t tap correctly but as so many people were going through you managed to slip through the gate anyway. Crowds can move quicker than gates. Never an issue getting it corrected though, whatever the cause.

There are two routes between the Central line and Crossrail, one fully ‘airside’ (shared with the Northern line) and one that goes up and down again. IIrc it was designed that way for crowd control in fairly narrow underground passageways that were expected to be excessively busy.

 

[Tetchytyke]

The TfL website was playing up for me yesterday, it sometimes showed an error that journey history wasn't available. Bashing F5 fixed it.

Helpdesk should be able to fix it for your wife, but she'll need to do it.