National Rail Smartcard Notes and an unhinged rant
Posted: 3rd May 2023
Today's post will investigate the insanity that is the National Rail Smartcard/ITSO card. For those who are unaware, you can now get a tap-to-go smartcard, similar to Oyster or OV Chipkaart for use on the Naitonal Rail Network in Britain. The thing is, the system that currently exists is in no way as universal as either of those two systems.
Issue 1 - There's a standard... But not really.
Issue 1 relates to what the heck the cards actually are. The "National Rail Smartcard" is built on the ITSO system - a great idea that aimed to create a universal smartcard standard for public transit in the UK. I have several ITSO cards now. One from Jersey's LibertyBus, one from Govia Thameslink and one from SE Trains. Two are "National Rail Smartcards", one is not. The problem here is that they are all ITSO cards, and all support the various tickets being loaded onto them. I can walk up to a ticket machine with an ITSO reader and tap my LibertyBus card on it, and it will recognise and will attempt to allow me to buy a ticket. It will fail (for the next reason) but it'll try.
How to solve this one is simple. Enforce your standards. If you have an ITSO card - let it work everywhere. It could be as great as OV Chipkaart - letting people use one card for all transit - but nope. This is Britain. Everything sucks.
Issue 2 - Rail Ticketing is too complex
I will now quote from a recent e-mail chain with SE Trains (the real name of Southeastern):
Thank you for getting back to us yesterday further to your query about smart ticketing, and the issues you've been having with the interoperability of smartcards between different train service providers. I've raised this with our Fares team to get some insight to help answer your query.
There are two parties when it comes to ticket sales, the producer and the retailer. The producer is the owner of the route that creates a ticket type for use. The retailer, as the name suggests, sells the ticket type. The smartcard itself is a container for the ticket type, much like a paper ticket's magnetic stripe, or an eticket's QR code.
As it currently stands, Southern doesn't allow the Smart Singles and Smart Returns they produce to be bought online. This means we, as a retailer, can't sell them via our app or website onto our Key smartcard. However, they can be bought at ticket machines, provided they're not enabled for Oyster - this is a restriction provided by TfL. As the ticket machines at [STATION] are Oyster-enabled, the Southern Smart tickets you're looking to buy aren't available from the machine - regardless of the ITSO smartcard you're using. However, they can still be bought from ticket office windows - either Southern's or any other operator's.
So, thank you for taking the time to get in touch with your enquiry. I hope this answer has been helpful.
What was I trying to do? Buy a single ticket between two stations on the Southern Network using the Southeastern App and load it onto my smartcard. This should work. Because of how UK trains work (see the Rail Settlement Plan for more detail), I can buy a ticket from any companies ticket window/online service/vending machine for any other train operators train. It's a little more complex if you want to use an operators special discounts (e.g. Grand Central's excelent student rates), but for any generic journey with a railcard, you use any old machine/website/window. However, the fares are set by the different operators, and because of this some are more picky about smartcard fares than others. So while Southeastern/SE Trains will let you buy a single on their app for their train and load it on your smartcard, you can't buy a Southern single and load it onto any smartcard, because Southern don't allow online ticket sales of singles to be loaded on. Talk about disjointed!
So why this post?
This is more just an unhinged rant about how stupid it all is. I'd very much appreciate it if someone who has the ability to change this would get in contact. I'd love to have a chat about this and why it's so frustrating. The smartcard has the potential to change how people travel in the UK on rail (and on other transit for that matter), but right now it's hamstrung by bone headed decision making like the above.
That's all for now. Enjoy this tweet thread I was sent about how someone rescued an egg plushy from a forest.