Project Oval capping

[Tetchytyke]

I'm struggling to get my head around how the capping process works for the new Project Oval stations.

I will be in London in a week or two and I am considering a visit to both Hemel Hempstead and St Albans. I'm considering taking the bus between the two so I would travel from London to one and then travel back to London from the other.

How does the capping work in such a situation? Does it cap out at the highest of the two caps? Weirdly the higher cap seems to be at St Albans City, even though the single fares from St Pancras to St Albans City are higher than the single fares to Hemel Hempstead.

 

[Bletchleyite]

I believe it is the highest applicable cap. If a lower cap plus one of the journeys charged separately gives a cheaper fare, it will do that (though it won't split fares). This was what was causing the oddly very low fares when it first launched, if I recall - it was because Boundary Zone 2 fares (I think) were set too low.

The caps to the out boundary stations are generally so high you're unlikely to hit them without multiple journeys, however, so most likely it'll just be charged as two singles.

 

[higthomas]

I presume there aren't any more "zones" beyond 15 or whatever Gatwick is, just per station to London caps?

 

[CyrusWuff]

I presume there aren't any more "zones" beyond 15 or whatever Gatwick is, just per station to London caps?

Correct. For the extensions beyond Zone 9, caps are generally based on the Day/Weekly Travelcard price. A PDF detailing the caps, and off-peak capping easements, can be downloaded from the Pay As You Go with Contactless page on the National Rail website.

 

[redreni]

Correct. For the extensions beyond Zone 9, caps are generally based on the Day/Weekly Travelcard price. A PDF detailing the caps, and off-peak capping easements, can be downloaded from the Pay As You Go with Contactless page on the National Rail website.

I wonder if all caps will continue to be London-centric even if, as the Liberal Democrats appear to be proposing, Contactless is rolled out across the whole of GB?

That PDF document would end up being quite lengthy...

 

[swt_passenger]

I wonder if all caps will continue to be London-centric even if, as the Liberal Democrats appear to be proposing, Contactless is rolled out across the whole of GB?

That PDF document would end up being quite lengthy...

Liberal Democrats - yet another organisation who haven’t thought through why a national or long distance Contactless scheme wouldn’t work. A fairly regular topic in these forums.

 

[Bletchleyite]

Liberal Democrats - yet another organisation who haven’t thought through why a national or long distance Contactless scheme wouldn’t work. A fairly regular topic in these forums.

It could and would, subject to the £100 limit being dropped as is planned. TfL's system would not, though. The way Oval works with capping on the whole journey makes little sense anyway - almost nobody will hit those caps unless they do the trunk journey more than once that day. It just has to be like that because it's how TfL's contactless system works.

See also that if you tap in before 0630 you pay an off peak fare - this is fixed by TfL, but makes little sense for longer distance journeys, as from places like Bletchley and similarly far out, it is totally normal to travel around then, it is not niche in the way taking a Tube before 0630 might be.

Piggybacking on TfL's system was a cheap and effective way of a South East rollout where almost every journey is to/from London with some use of the Tube and/or buses on arrival. It isn't a nationally extensible system, but such systems do exist.

 

[Hadders]

It could and would, subject to the £100 limit being dropped as is planned.

I don't think the £100 limit has anything to do with it. Transit mode works differently to 'normal' contactless.

The issue with a nationwide contactless zone is what would the maximum charge be? Say someone doesn't touch in at Penzance but travels to and touches out at Wick what would the charge be? How would this be different to someone travelling from Georgemass Junction to Wick?

 

[35B]

I don't think the £100 limit has anything to do with it. Transit mode works differently to 'normal' contactless.

The issue with a nationwide contactless zone is what would the maximum charge be? Say someone doesn't touch in at Penzance but travels to and touches out at Wick what would the charge be? How would this be different to someone travelling from Georgemass Junction to Wick?

I'm no fan of contactless at the national level, but I think the Penzance/Wick example is overwrought. It ought to be possible to calibrate a maximum charge based on an understanding of what the median fares are, and then frankly put the burden on long distance operators to do some effective ticket checking to catch those going over-distance without causing undue fares loss.

 

[Bletchleyite]

I'm no fan of contactless at the national level, but I think the Penzance/Wick example is overwrought. It ought to be possible to calibrate a maximum charge based on an understanding of what the median fares are, and then frankly put the burden on long distance operators to do some effective ticket checking to catch those going over-distance without causing undue fares loss.

It is also possible to do stuff like permanently block cards if there is persistent failure to touch at one end. This would get rather inconvenient. Yes, you can create virtual cards on many banks now, but I suspect if you started creating and deleting them on a daily basis you would soon come unstuck as suspicions started to be raised - banks are quite hot on anything that looks like financial crime.

Years ago I proposed a system of barcode e-tickets on here (or possibly on uk.railway, I forget, but I think it was here) that was remarkably similar to (but not quite the same as) the one that actually happened. It was rubbished because it wasn't perfectly secure, just as the system we have isn't. The thing is, any new system just needs to be roughly as secure as what is there now, and paper tickets are not 100% secure either - they can be forged and they can be re-used if not stamped, and you can easily short-fare if not caught. So any contactless system doesn't have to be perfect either, it just has to be no worse than what went before (or maybe a little worse if it saves on costs as the e-ticket system has done).

 

[Tetchytyke]

The issue with a nationwide contactless zone is what would the maximum charge be? Say someone doesn't touch in at Penzance but travels to and touches out at Wick what would the charge be? How would this be different to someone travelling from Georgemass Junction to Wick?

The maximum fare doesn't have to be the maximum possibly fare you could pay though. It isn't in TfL world where, if you tap in in the zones, the maximum fare is usually £9.40. That is cheaper than some single fares and so there are examples where it is cheaper to "forget" to touch in or out. It just needs to be high enough to be dissuasive to most people, and you can base that on the median fare paid at a station. In that example, you'd possibly set the maximum fare from Wick to be slightly higher than the single fare to Inverness.

I don't think a nationwide contactless system could ever work for other reasons, but not that one.

The caps to the out boundary stations are generally so high you're unlikely to hit them without multiple journeys, however, so most likely it'll just be charged as two singles.

Yeah, the cap from St Albans City in particular seems to be insanely high compared to the single fares charged.

I presume this is because journeys from London in the evening peak are charged at a peak rate but count towards the off-peak cap, so the off-peak cap is insanely high to compensate for this.

I'm staying near Stratford so there will be travel in the zones. I'll have to do the sums to see what's cheaper. I suspect I may just stick to paper singles for the journey out of the zones.

 

[Bletchleyite]

I'm staying near Stratford so there will be travel in the zones. I'll have to do the sums to see what's cheaper. I suspect I may just stick to paper singles for the journey out of the zones.

Unless you have a Railcard or are using Advances it shouldn't generally be cheaper to use paper tickets. If an inner cap plus singles is cheaper than the outboundary cap it will use the combination of those (which as noted was why anomalously low fares were being charged when the scheme started, which went on for a few months before it was fixed, no doubt costing WMT etc millions). I suspect the most likely situation for those travelling from Bletchley would be that it would charge a Bletchley-BZ2 single, a BZ2-Bletchley single and a 1-2 cap, if any cap is hit. A "traditional" in, two Tube journeys and out trip wouldn't likely hit any cap whether paid separately or all on contactless, it requires a few Tube journeys to get to the 1-2 cap.

 

[Edvid]

[TfL's PAYG system] isn't a nationally extensible system, but such systems do exist.

Is the Tap Converter system (currently under development) potentially one of them?

Tap Converter: media-agnostic PAYG service

Rail Delivery Group recently issued a preliminary market engagement notice in relation to the Tap Converter service. Tracsis won the contract to supply it six months ago and work is already underway to add, for instance, certain rail routes to the Manchester-centric (Bee Network) PAYG area next...

www.railforums.co.uk

 

[Bletchleyite]

Is the Tap Converter system (currently under development) potentially one of them?

Tap Converter: media-agnostic PAYG service

Rail Delivery Group recently issued a preliminary market engagement notice in relation to the Tap Converter service. Tracsis won the contract to supply it six months ago and work is already underway to add, for instance, certain rail routes to the Manchester-centric (Bee Network) PAYG area next...

www.railforums.co.uk

I don't know about that one but I do know GTR's system will allow PAYG payment for a full set of existing walk up fares with no need for single fare pricing (even though I support it), even to the extent that it knows about break of journey and will apply a through fare with a break if cheaper than a split.

Oval was pragmatism as a way of rolling it out quickly but comes with a load of TfL-specific downsides. The pre-0630 off peak must on its own be costing the railway a fortune.

 

[MikeWh]

Is the Tap Converter system (currently under development) potentially one of them?

Tap Converter: media-agnostic PAYG service

Rail Delivery Group recently issued a preliminary market engagement notice in relation to the Tap Converter service. Tracsis won the contract to supply it six months ago and work is already underway to add, for instance, certain rail routes to the Manchester-centric (Bee Network) PAYG area next...

www.railforums.co.uk

It depends exactly what it would do. If it is designed to direct taps from different smartcards to the correct system then that is one thing. The problem that I see is how to cope with bank cards which may be applicable to different PAYG systems. Would TfL be prepared to send all Underground/DLR/Bus taps to a nationwide clearing house which understood all the rules for each system? If they were forced by government then it gives them scope to blame revenue loss on the government, which probably isn't something the government would want.

Back to the OP: You'll be charged single fares for each journey. You won't be limited by either the Hemel or St Albans caps because you'll only make one single journey as far as they are concerned. However, if you make sufficient journeys within zones 1-2 (which includes Stratford) then you may find that a zone 1-2 cap is applied and reduced single fares from BZ2-Hemel and At Albans-BZ2 are charged on top. Bear in mind that an Underground journey in zone 1 will add £2.80/£2.90 to the normal single from Euston-Hemel or St Albans-St Pancras and it doesn't take long to reach the £8.90 daily zone 1-2 cap. I'd be very interested to see your journey history afterwards if you do this sequence of journeys.

 

[Cloud Strife]

I'm no fan of contactless at the national level, but I think the Penzance/Wick example is overwrought. It ought to be possible to calibrate a maximum charge based on an understanding of what the median fares are, and then frankly put the burden on long distance operators to do some effective ticket checking to catch those going over-distance without causing undue fares loss.

One simple option could be to add a system of 'verifying taps'. So, let's say you're on a London-Inverness train. When you get the ticket checked, the tap would increase the maximum fare possible on that card. Same with ticket barriers.

Imagine you're travelling from Chelmsford to Brodick. The first tap at Chelmsford would authorise travel as far as London or Norwich. The next tap gives you access to the London zones. You then tap out and back in at Euston, which increases the maximum fare to Glasgow. If there wasn't a tap at Euston for whatever reason, then the on-board check also performs the same as the barriers in the station.

So, the long distance operators would have to make sure that people have tapped in at either the stations or on-board, because otherwise they'll receive absolutely nothing for the journey. If a station has multiple platforms behind barriers, then they also need to do the verifying taps onboard to allocate the revenue correctly.

 

[MikeWh]

You then tap out and back in at Euston, which increases the maximum fare to Glasgow.

So the person travelling to Watford Junction, who finds the open gates don't accept the touch and they don't notice, gets a several hundred pound charge which takes their account into the red.

 

[redreni]

So the person travelling to Watford Junction, who finds the open gates don't accept the touch and they don't notice, gets a several hundred pound charge which takes their account into the red.

Would/could the London Overground barriers be set up differently?

If this hypothetical Watford Junction passenger was using an intercity service that officially calls at Watford Junction for pick-up only, then I'm sure a lot of railway staff would be both amused and delighted if they received a maximum fare of whatever the median fare is on the WCML.

 

[MikeWh]

Would/could the London Overground barriers be set up differently?

Yes, but LNW services can go from any platform at Euston. They're not limited by the third rail.

 

[Hadders]

One simple option could be to add a system of 'verifying taps'. So, let's say you're on a London-Inverness train. When you get the ticket checked, the tap would increase the maximum fare possible on that card. Same with ticket barriers.

Imagine you're travelling from Chelmsford to Brodick. The first tap at Chelmsford would authorise travel as far as London or Norwich. The next tap gives you access to the London zones. You then tap out and back in at Euston, which increases the maximum fare to Glasgow. If there wasn't a tap at Euston for whatever reason, then the on-board check also performs the same as the barriers in the station.

So, the long distance operators would have to make sure that people have tapped in at either the stations or on-board, because otherwise they'll receive absolutely nothing for the journey. If a station has multiple platforms behind barriers, then they also need to do the verifying taps onboard to allocate the revenue correctly.

What happens if I'm travelling from London to Edinburgh, I touch in at Kings Cross and get checked by a keen train manager just before Stevenage. There's no check on the rest of the journey. At Edinburgh I leave the station without touching out.

WHat am I charged?

 

[swt_passenger]

I'm no fan of contactless at the national level, but I think the Penzance/Wick example is overwrought. It ought to be possible to calibrate a maximum charge based on an understanding of what the median fares are, and then frankly put the burden on long distance operators to do some effective ticket checking to catch those going over-distance without causing undue fares loss.

How do you do ‘effective ticket checking’ if someone simply presents a contactless card? All that happens at the moment is they check the card isn’t blacklisted. They don’t know from that where you touched in, or where you’re going? Unless you add a live national database which can find touches in real time?

 

[redreni]

Isn't the point of PAYG with a payment card that it's easier than buying a ticket if you don't really care what the fare is?

A lot of people don't really care what the fare is when they travel in and around London. I'm sure the same might be true of PTE areas outside London or for shorter journeys where the fares aren't going to surprise anyone.

Most people do start to care about fares when they get above a certain amount, probably well before they reach three figures.

And as soon as you care what the fare is and have to look it up before you travel, the benefit of convenience is largely lost. All that remains is the downside of having to remember where you're supposed to tap, which card you used to tap in, and so on. It's just not a good idea for longer journeys, even if it could be made to work.

The benefit of local schemes is you can set the maximum fare at a level that isn't going to put people over their credit limit.

 

[PeterC]

How do you do ‘effective ticket checking’ if someone simply presents a contactless card? All that happens at the moment is they check the card isn’t blacklisted. They don’t know from that where you touched in, or where you’re going? Unless you add a live national database which can find touches in real time?

The guard/RPI doesn't need to know. The journey can be built by the back end. The appropriate default fare can be built from that. Board at Paddington, default can be set to Reading. Checked on board and the default flips to perhaps Oxford or Bristol.

A national scheme can't be implemented by adding more and more stations to Oval. It would need, for better or worse, a new design in software, hardware and manual procedures.

== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: 2 Oct 2025 ==

So, the long distance operators would have to make sure that people have tapped in at either the stations or on-board, because otherwise they'll receive absolutely nothing for the journey. If a station has multiple platforms behind barriers, then they also need to do the verifying taps onboard to allocate the revenue correctly.

Exactly.

 

[Bletchleyite]

A national scheme can't be implemented by adding more and more stations to Oval. It would need, for better or worse, a new design in software, hardware and manual procedures.

And there are options that aren't just charging a maximum fare, such as just blocking misused (i.e. ones persistently missing touches) cards permanently and irrevocably. Yes, virtual cards are a thing, but if you start creating a virtual card once a week and there are failed high value transport related authorisations on all of them you're soon going to be subject to a fraud investigation and dumped by your bank very quickly.

Yes, that mean the railway loses one Penzance-Wick fare for that person, but remember no system has to be perfectly secure - paper tickets aren't. They just need to be secure enough for most use cases.

 

[35B]

The guard/RPI doesn't need to know. The journey can be built by the back end. The appropriate default fare can be built from that. Board at Paddington, default can be set to Reading. Checked on board and the default flips to perhaps Oxford or Bristol.

A national scheme can't be implemented by adding more and more stations to Oval. It would need, for better or worse, a new design in software, hardware and manual procedures.

== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: 2 Oct 2025 ==


Exactly.

And it's these complexities, already difficult to manage in an area as small as greater London, that undermine the idea of a national scheme.

While I'm entirely relaxed about the ability to define maximum fares in a way that avoids the absurdity of going to the maximum fare charged (there will be plenty of data that will allow this to be done probabilistically), one of the key issues with the current schemes (max fare, penalty fares) is perceived unfairness. As the distances scale, the difficulty of achieving something that, as seen by the public, is simple, affordable and fair grows exponentially.

Like the Tower of Babel, the issue is not whether it is possible to do this, but whether it is actually a good idea in the first place.

 

[MikeWh]

Like the Tower of Babel, the issue is not whether it is possible to do this, but whether it is actually a good idea in the first place.

I need a like button!

 

[Wallsendmag]

What happens if I'm travelling from London to Edinburgh, I touch in at Kings Cross and get checked by a keen train manager just before Stevenage. There's no check on the rest of the journey. At Edinburgh I leave the station without touching out.

WHat am I charged?

You get charged the fare to the first stop at least as LNER aren't part of Oval, plus of course a maximum fare for Oval. Plus if the TM is that keen they'll notice you haven't got off.

 

[Bletchleyite]

You get charged the fare to the first stop at least as LNER aren't part of Oval, plus of course a maximum fare for Oval

One wonders if the main drive behind LNER ceasing to carry passengers between London and Stevenage is them not wishing to be part of Oval and thus losing control of the ability to regulate (season tickets aside) the number of tickets they sell for this journey.

It'll be interesting to see the effect on Avanti loadings to/from MKC when there is no longer a dedicated fare for WMT or Avanti - will more people use Avanti if it's the same price and all fares including Oval are inter available?

 

[redreni]

One wonders if the main drive behind LNER ceasing to carry passengers between London and Stevenage is them not wishing to be part of Oval and thus losing control of the ability to regulate (season tickets aside) the number of tickets they sell for this journey.

It'll be interesting to see the effect on Avanti loadings to/from MKC when there is no longer a dedicated fare for WMT or Avanti - will more people use Avanti if it's the same price and all fares including Oval are inter available?

I bet oval expansion to Stevanage would have been a lot less popular if people had been told "you won't have to buy a ticket, but you also won't be allowed on some of the trains even if you do have a ticket" and were then asked if they were in favour.

Sometimes you need to give people some basic information before asking them if they're in favour of something.

 

[ThisIsSurbiton]

I may be biased, but the only way I can see a national PAYG scheme working is with an app (or some open system allowing many apps) that know where we've been. And if we're going a long way, Advance fares are always going to be better, and it's hard to imagine those being integrated, at least with any idea of what to pay being obvious up front. I think it's more important to get local transport included than to handle the whole country. Perhaps a nationwide scheme with a distance limit?