Railcard discounts beyond West Drayton to Reading

[bakerstreet]

Generic question,

Is there a smart card which is valid on GWR/Elizabeth Line on which you can add a standard national railcard with the smart card charging pay as you go fares and capping. Or any combination of the above.

Specific scenario

Say I want to travel from Ealing Broadway to Reading with a nationally available railcard discount. Currently, I could buy a paper ticket with the discount or I can use contactless without the discount. I’m wondering if there is a third option of a TOC smartcard.

 

[Watershed]

You can either use:

• Contactless PAYG, which will charge you the undiscounted adult fare. In many cases this will be more expensive than paper tickets, because of the Railcard discount you could get, and/or because Off-Peak fares are charged at different times (e.g. there is no evening peak for the paper fares if using Elizabeth line services).
• Conventional single/return tickets with the full Railcard discount. These are available in eTicket format, but seemingly not smartcard format, for this journey.

What you can't currently get is a PAYG option that provides Railcard discounts, as is the case for KeyGo on GTR for example. So you have to choose between PAYG and Railcard discounts.

 

[bakerstreet]

Thank you, that’s what I suspected. I just wanted to check I wasn’t missing something