TIS determines gateline acceptance?

[maniacmartin]

I commute between London Overground-operated stations on a paper season ticket, starting short from the printed origin on the ticket.

I have had this season issued by London Overground, Southern and Greater Anglia which work fine. However, my latest two tickets were bought from Northern and Southeastern, and they do not operate the gates.

I think the code was 116 but I am not sure. (That would be 'This station is not listed as allowed for entry and exit with this ticket'). After I get the ticket reissued from Greater Anglia they work fine.

All of the working and non-working tickets were purchased on weekends with a start date of the following Monday.

Does anyone have any idea what's going on here? Do different TISes encode season magstripes in subtly different ways?

 

[maniacmartin]

The code is 116.
I bought two more identical tickets. One from East Coast and one from Greater Anglia. The former didn't open the gates but the latter did.

 

[wibble]

TIS don't determine ticket acceptance through gate lines. The gates are programmed for ticket acceptance by the TOC that operates the station. However, TIS may encode the magnetic stripe on the back of the ticket in different ways which results in identical journeys, issued through different TIS, being rejected at gates.

 

[LexyBoy]

TIS don't determine ticket acceptance through gate lines. The gates are programmed for ticket acceptance by the TOC that operates the station. However, TIS may encode the magnetic stripe on the back of the ticket in different ways which results in identical journeys, issued through different TIS, being rejected at gates.

Isn't that what maniacmartin is saying?

Come to think of it, I've noticed similar things: Didcot-Oxford for example is sometimes accepted at Reading and sometimes not. I'll check this out next time I'm travelling.

Since nobody with actual knowledge of the system has replied yet, I will speculate wildly The magstrip holds 192 bits of information which encodes the origin and destination stations and presumably routeing information. I guess the stations will be encoded by their NLC, and many stations have multiple NLCs (wiki). It could be that the gates have been programmed to recognise BoJ with one set of NLCs, but don't recognise the others despite representing the same stations. Different TISes may be set up with different sets of NLCs. It might be possible to test this by purchasing from both a site you know works and one that doesn't, entering the same NLC codes into both (rather than station names). I'm just guessing though that the code would be retained throughout the booking process, whereas the name is converted to a code on entry.

Another possibility could be different encoding of route information but I'm not sure if gatelines check this information.

 

[talldave]

I'm sure there's a "quality of recording" issue between machines. I never have any problems with my tickets which I always collect from the same machine. Earlier this week my booking failed and I had to purchase from another machine for my daughter. She spent all day with it being refused by Underground barriers!!

 

[maniacmartin]

I got a few more tickets to investigate a bit more.
It appears that for certain TISes if the start date is not the date of purchase (ie purchased in advance) then it doesn't operate the LO barriers.

 

[wibble]

Since nobody with actual knowledge of the system has replied yet,

Seems you know less about the subject than me!