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Interesting, so about five years after a better system came into use in London, Bristol received a worse one. All the signs are that although the top level specification is good below the surface the Bristol PAYG software & equipment are dreadful. And more interesting still, as far as I can...

I am afraid I do. It is just so convenient & also the GWR PAYG structure saves money on single journeys, including allowing you to decide after the outward journey where you are returning from, but I suspect that for most people those are minor advantages compared to just buying a return on...

Perhaps in London everyone is a criminal or has decided that 'the system' is loaded against them so they will game it as much as possible but out here deep in the West Country (Bristol) my experience of PAYG default max fares has been that they result from the system losing taps that have...

I do not think I have ever experienced a failure to write to the card, without the failure being obvious at the time, for example failed gate at Weston. The auto fills and penalties appear to come from the tap becoming lost in the system. As far as I can tell the journey info on the card is just...

I thought there were once some easements on the 0930 limit for travel from minor stations to a main station from which the 0930 limit applied, but checking some off peak and day return fares from Sea Mills (SML) to Cheltenham, Birmingham & Sheffield (SHF) I could not find any. So you buy the all...

Interesting, my tap in in the Bristol PAYG area went entirely as normal, including email confirming charging.

As for whether ticket offices should sell such things, I believe there has long been an official claim that ticket offices must offer the cheapest fare for a journey, which gets more & more meaningless the more you try & work out what it means, but imagine the outcry if ticket offices were not...

So that makes five PAYG users. Anyway, glad my comment was useful. As it happens I went PAYG to Weston on Monday, so will probably not find out what the second deadline meant, as I have now tapped in. The system charged correctly & picked up an outstanding 70p, although it happened after two...

& Finally on the 25th GWR sent an email saying that the upgrade had taken place on the 24th, & with instructions as to what to do. Fairly simple, enter new password, & for PAYG, update payment method, the latter to be done by 4 March if I wished to continue to use PAYG. So I did those, reusing...

Miswording is a very polite term if 'Collect your new card from a station' means 'Take your old card to a station & tap it'. For a GWR PAYG card does it just mean tap as usual?

And now for a bit of light relief the entire GWR internet system is being thrown up in the air and recast for 'planned maintenance', requiring a password reset, entering new payment card details, vanishing previously booked tickets, no new PAYG user creation this week, and PAYG outage next...

Lot of back and forth without explanation is surprising, I think you usually get to someone you can discuss it with at about the third email. Have you invoked higher authority yet? Perhaps, first, it might be useful to check your argument by opening a thread in the Fare Disputes section of this...

One of those franchises was handed back due to government rapacity in relation to premiums, the general end to franchises came with Covid, when the government banned rail travel. Not much you can do running a franchise or any kind of business that the government has banned.

If the SE Wales PAYG system is like the GWR Bristol one then the equivalents to the paper off peak fares will be listed as PAYG fares in the PAYG table. There does seem to be some very odd logic, perhaps AI in the Bristol system, so, as with my recent experience (1) of a month-long failure to...

Bright, even gaudy, cheerful, vague hint of speed, somewhat confusing if you look down the train, novelty appeal will last for a while, but it will soon seem tacky, inelegant and unsophisticated, especially for those old enough to remember NSE, for whom the association with commuting will pall...

It is not clear whether the journey was split at Cheltenham in the sense of tapping in and out or whether C707 just changed trains there, spending a very boring hour on the platform. The fact that the PAYG rules do ask you to tap out on leaving the station if breaking a journey implies that they...

Having written so much about the PAYG side of this journey (1), I may as well briefly resume the Annals of Bristol Rail Travel. Friday 251024 thought about taking the 0905 or perhaps the 1005 train to Severn Beach (SVB) noticed about 40 min before departure that it was 20 min late leaving...

Since the system is still deployed I assume that problems are rare, but looking back through this thread I seem to have had quite enough, and I cannot think of anything unusual about my computer & browser. I suppose you could argue that there have not been enough problems during the last two...

7 Nov 2025 If only I had taken my own advice. Today, after GWR losing yet another tap at Sea Mills, I have been charged £45 for a trip from Yate, despite submitting two complaints, one on each receipt of the warning, and several attempts to amend the entry. I think from now on I shall buy...

The announcements on GWR services asking passengers to help other passengers who appear to need assistance, or to call staff, are tiptoeing round the edge of setting up a volunteer service.