Produced an expired Railcard

[Adam Williams]

The discounted offer price of a Digital Railcard from Trainpal (and sister company Trip.com) is indeed contingent on then buying a rail ticket from them - only after that is done will the Digital Railcard be issued.

The ticket purchased can however be the cheapest child ticket available.

I don't know about the visibility (or otherwise) of Digital Railcards from the various retailers to TOC investigation teams.

Digital Railcard retailers should be sending a feed of daily data regarding railcard purchases to RDG, and this should be made clear to anyone purchasing a railcard.

Quite how this works with CTrip's "activation nonsense" is anyone's guess. Do they consider the Railcard to have been purchased at the point of payment, even if it's then inaccessible? Is that what determines the start date, and sending the data over to RDG? If this was the case, it would imply you could associate the Railcard e.g. with a Smartcard online and benefit from discounted fares before the Railcard was even available in-app to show to revenue inspectors. Is the Railcard subsequently then non-issued if nobody buys a ticket to "activate" it within the prescribed timescales? Is the Railcard considered to be hotlisted whilst it's not activated?

The spec is silent on the answers to any of these questions, because the whole thing is outwith the specification clause which explicitly requires railcards to be available immediately after purchase.

 

[Hadders]

The ticket purchased can however be the cheapest child ticket available.

This would be perfectly legal, as would purchasing a ticket with a 16-17 Railcard discount or Job Centre Plus discount applied.

If this happened let's hope it wouldn't flag in a train company phishing expedition...