Oyster Cards – also avalible a bit beyond London

If there’s one thing I like is simplifying my travels – and one thing that does help simply it a bit is Transport for London’s Oyster Card.

My “current” Oyster card. I’ve lost count of how many of them gone through (although I have got enough webcredits out of TfL)

Now, if you’re visiting London for more than a few days, I’d strongly recommend you get an Oyster card – as paper tickets are expensive compared to Oyster tickets:

• Oyster Card cost £5
• Zone 1 to Zone 1 ticket (Cash) £4.70
• Zone 1 to Zone 1 ticket (Oyster) £2.20
• Saving = £2.50 a ticket

So you’ll need to buy two zone 1 tickets to recoup the cost of an Oyster. A more relevant example would be:

• Oyster Card cost £5
• Zone 6 (Heathrow) to Zone 1 (Central London) ticket (Cash) £5.70
• Zone 6 (Heathrow) to Zone 1 (Central London) ticket (Cash) £5 peak, £3 off peak.
• Saving = 70p to £2.70 a ticket.

So as you see, it’s pretty easy to recover the cost of your Oyster card quickly.

Oyster has been available on the Underground, Buses and trams for a while, with Rail services finally coming aboard from January 2010 (with SouthEastern High Speed, Heathrow Express and Heathrow Connect between Hayes and Harlington and the Heathrow Terminals as the exception).

However, Oyster is available beyond London too in limited destinations. These include:

• Operated by c2c: Purfleet, Ockendon, Chafford Hundred and Grays
• Operated by Greater Anglia: Brentwood, Shenfield, Boxeborne
• Operated by London Overground: Watford Junction

A full map is at http://www.tfl.gov.uk/cdn/static/cms/documents/london-rail-and-tube-services-map.pdf. Be warned, that you must keep within the zones and destination in the map, or you could be hit for penalty fares (like someone did… and got stung for £42,550 fine for dodging fares by only touching once with their Oyster Card).

If your travels need to take you beyond Central London, it’s worth considering the rail networks. There’s more to London than just the centre of it…

… as there is more of the United Kingdom than London.