As it was TFL somehow mucked up the charges applied to Mrs Tags oyster as she was charged well over the daily limit on the day in question. We think this was connected with tapping I at Paddington and next tapping out at Shepherds Bush. I'm guessing she needed to tap both ways at West Drayton.
hmm.
i'm not expert, but think if the (apparent) journey from Paddington to Shepherds Bush took longer than the system considered reasonable, it will charge a maximum fare.
if something has gone wrong, it may be worth
contacting them and trying to get it sorted out. I'm not sure i've ever had a need to do it, but from what i gather, it's relatively easy (if the same person does it a lot, they might suspect you of taking the piss)
I have a freedom pass which again, would not have coped with this. There really is a big need for a fully integrated system.
ah.
again, free travel on rail (and things like underground / trams / metro) isn't part of the national concessionary travel scheme, which just covers just buses. Some places like london do this as a local extension to the statutory scheme, and some places that have trams allow free travel for local concessionary pass-holders but not others (from memory, the nottingham trams only accept nottingham city and nottinghamshire county issued passes.)
yes, it would help if you could add some 'pay as you go' to passes like this for journeys that are outside the scope of freedom pass (i used to work for a tfl contractor bus operator so had a purple oyster card which was valid on underground and tfl rail / overground but not national rail, and it didn't have the capacity to add PAYG to it, so I had to carry a separate paid-for oyster card for that sort of thing. think i only cocked it up once or twice.)
but take it you know you can buy tickets from 'boundary zone 6' to places beyond london if you already have a travelcard / freedom pass to cover part of the journey? i think you have to get these from ticket offices not machines, though (again, with living outside london, i can't remember having to do this, and not sure you can do it for inter-city type trains that don't stop anywhere near the boundary station.)
and there are a few differences between the 'boundary' station for travelcard zone 6 and freedom pass. (map showing freedom pass rail boundaries
here.) - freedom pass is valid (for example) to dartford, which is outside zone 6.
and some train companies ticket vending machines will let you buy paper tickets from stations other than where you are - again, i've not tried it on GWR, but SWR ones do - for example when I was commuting in to london, i'd occasionally want to travel beyond my usual station to go in to Reading for the evening, without getting off the train / going home on the way - I was able to buy a single or return ticket from wokingham to reading from the machines or ticket office at wimbledon or clapham junction.
at the risk of stating the bloody obvious, the general rule now is you should make every effort to get ticket/s for the full journey before you start rather than sort it out at your arrival station.
