Oxford/Oxford Parkway

[newmilton]

Apologies if this has already been asked, but the Oxford Parkway threads I found seem to predate the completion of the link into Oxford.

Yesterday I travelled from Marylebone to Oxford on a print-at-home off-peak return MYB-OXF bought from Chiltern's website. Not being entirely certain where I wanted to get off, I booked to Oxford itself rather than Parkway, but decided in the event to use Parkway station and the bus to my final destination.

At Parkway my ticket wouldn't open the barrier, but when I showed it to a member of staff he waved me through without question. Was my ticket to Oxford not valid at Parkway, or was it simply a problem with the barcode scanner? I presume my return is valid on the principle that an off-peak return permits break of journey on the return leg.

(I did notice when booking my ticket, that had I booked to Parkway alone, I would have saved the grand total of 10p!)

 

[ForTheLoveOf]

Apologies if this has already been asked, but the Oxford Parkway threads I found seem to predate the completion of the link into Oxford.

Yesterday I travelled from Marylebone to Oxford on a print-at-home off-peak return MYB-OXF bought from Chiltern's website. Not being entirely certain where I wanted to get off, I booked to Oxford itself rather than Parkway, but decided in the event to use Parkway station and the bus to my final destination.

At Parkway my ticket wouldn't open the barrier, but when I showed it to a member of staff he waved me through without question. Was my ticket to Oxford not valid at Parkway, or was it simply a problem with the barcode scanner? I presume my return is valid on the principle that an off-peak return permits break of journey on the return leg.

Whether or not a ticket barrier accepts your ticket for entry or exit is in no way determinative of the validity of your ticket. Valid tickets frequently get rejected, just as invalid tickets are sometimes accepted.

Travel from Marylebone to Oxford via Oxford Parkway is definitely permitted on a London Terminals to Oxford Off-Peak Return, as is breaking your journey there. You are valid to be using that route in several different ways: you are on a through train, plus it is a mapped route (and in view of the frequent, direct service, it is a very reasonable route too).

Unfortunately some members of barrier seem to think the barriers are omniscient, and thus treat a rejection of a ticket as final. This can cause issues! You might like to contact Chiltern Railways to ask them to fix their barriers, but you'll probably be fobbed off with a nonsensical and/or irrelevant response. At least with a couple of TOCs, we have active members here on the forum who we can ask to fix dodgy barrier encoding.

 

[Paul Kelly]

It's probably particularly problematical at stations like Oxford Parkway that can validly be approached in either direction from a large number of stations. E.g. it's fine to stop short at OXP on a ticket from London Terminals to Oxford if you've come from Marylebone, but if you'd come from Paddington then your ticket's validity would have expired when you reached Oxford and wouldn't be valid to travel further to OXP. The gateline attendant probably needs to make a judgment based on an assumption of which train you've alighted from.

Edit thinking a bit more: if you've passed through the ticket gates at Marylebone that will be encoded on the ticket's magnetic stripe, so it might be possible for an intelligently-programmed gate to make a reasonable guess. I'm not sure if there are any gates currently on the market that allow acceptance/rejection based on the last barrier the ticket previously passed through, though.