Contactless – at last!
The Department for Transport have announced that from 2 February the contactless readers – which have been at our stations for over a year – will finally be switched on.
In principle this is a welcome step forward – and one we have been demanding for years. It should make travel easier for peak time rail users.
However there are many travellers who may end up paying more if they use contactless.
First, the contactless system does not know about railcards: if you have a senior, student, disabled or veteran railcard, there is no way of registering this on the contactless system. Instead, the contactless system will simply charge you full fare. You will need to buy a paper or digital ticket – but then daily/weekly fare capping won’t work for you. (There’s no fundamental reason why railcards could not have been included in the system – and we would have thought that the delays in implementation would have given time to sort this out.)
Second, the related changes to the fare system (peak periods and removing off-peak returns) leaves the current bizarre situation where – for some off-peak periods – it is cheaper to buy a return paper ticket to London from Hildenborough or Tonbridge than it is to use contactless (or buy two single paper tickets) from Sevenoaks. That’s because stations down the line have different off peak windows.
Third, contactless works on the basis of the full journey from the first station where you touch in to the last station where you touch out, so “split tickets” can still be cheaper. What’s more, touching-out at an intermediate station and then touching-in again at the same station with the same card shortly afterwards may not count as a “split ticket” but just as a continuation of the same journey (it often does on TfL, but on TfL end-to-end journeys are usually cheaper than split journeys (except possibly where peak periods are involved), which is not the case on National Rail).
It would be great if these issues could have been sorted and communicated before the much delayed roll out … so please be careful!
PAYG is full of surprises. You can often ‘break’ an Oyster continuation journey by touching in on a TfL bus outside the station and immediately getting off. Even easier with Contactless, you can re-enter using a different bank card.
You might think that at any given time a zonal rail journey using TfL would always cost the same, but using the Elizabeth Line to Heathrow attracts a swingeing surcharge. Take the Picc to Hatton Cross instead, touch out and you’ve skipped the surcharge and probably the Heathrow permanent peak surcharge as well. Best of all, there’s no further charge: travel between Hatton Cross and all terminals is always free, ditto between all terminals, even on the Heathrow Express.
There seems to be an added complication in having to check whether your destination also has active contactless machines otherwise you won’t be able to tap out on arrival.Is this correct?
That’s true – and wrongly assuming that Sevenoaks to Tonbridge is contactless could result in a double penalty: a penalty fare Sevenoaks to Tonbridge *and* a maximum contactless fare for not having touched-out the journey started at Sevenoaks.
Worth flagging this up!
National Rail have issued a map of the Contactless area w.e.f. 2 Feb 25, although I’ve yet to see a poster version.
https://tinyurl.com/bdhnc4ce
It’s a bit confusing: the Overground is shown in bold blue but the Underground and Luton DART are greyed out, and the Docklands Light Railway and London Trams are completely missing. Yet Contactless is valid on all of them !
This parochial thinking is unhelpful, passengers are more concerned whether their card will be valid rather than knowing the identity of some obscure Train Operating Company.
Similarly, refusing to mention the word ‘Oyster’ may mislead visitors and non-anoraks thinking that Oyster is a Contactless card so they’ll use Oyster to travel to Sevenoaks, only to be welcomed by a maximum Oyster fare, plus the single fare and even prosecution and a criminal record !
National Rail has today released the February 2025 version of the ‘London & the South East rail services’ map. It shows all the stations where Oyster and/or Contactless payments are now accepted. Oyster is shown by a blue dot in a black circle, Contactless by the four wavy lines symbol. https://tinyurl.com/eutcunm6
Note the info in the white box in square K7: you must stay wholly within the Contactless area. The good news is that this permits travel from Shoreham to London via Sevenoaks.
Unfortunately, the only detailed map on display at Sevenoaks is ‘London’s Rail and Tube services’ which hasn’t yet been updated. It’s very confusing because it doesn’t show that you can use Contactless to go to Gatwick via Orpington or Otford, Watford Junction and Hertford. Even worse, the bad news is that it fails to warn that you can’t use Contactless to go to Gatwick via Tonbridge and Godstone (or to Reading via Bracknell). How many will find out the hard way?
Contactless can also be more expensive if you break and resume your journey, e.g. to go shopping in Orpington or Bromley.
Far from guaranteeing the best fare as promised, it seems that using Contactless from Sevenoaks will often be a losing gamble.