Comment by hdgvhicv
1 day ago
Oyster came in as travelcard only, and was valid on all in zone transport including the pre-tfl North London Line etc.
It wasn’t valid to say Watford though.
When PAYG was introduced it was not valid on trains (other than a couple of exceptions)
But You’re right, Oyster PAYG came in the day TfL took over from silverlink - 11 November 2007. It was 2010 before it came out across the whole travelcard area on rail services. That was because the other TOCs didn’t like the idea and felt they’d lose out on revenue.
> Oyster came in as travelcard only
I don't think this can be correct. One of the early Oyster "problems" was that people who'd routinely made some particular journey on their travelcard, perhaps for years, would get locked out of Oyster and be unable to start a second journey. The reason was that their Travelcard had never been valid for their journey but it was valid for both the entry station and exit station and before Oyster it had no way to connect the dots, now Oyster could see the journey route wasn't allowed and so it charged them, making their balance negative, whereupon they can't start a second journey until they pay for the first.
Edited to add: Oh wait, maybe you meant only on (what would be) Overground stations ? That seems very weird, but I guess I can't prove you're wrong.
First was staff travel, then annual and monthly travel adds, then Prepay (later PAYG) on the tube, then bus, then overground, then later suburban trains.
If you had a z1-3 travelcard you could travel to zone 6 with Prepay as long as you had a positive credit and would have the allroaite fare deducted. For travel on train you had to buy an “extension ticket” though. That I think might have extended even past payg availability on trains for a while.
It’s amazing in hindsight how quickly things changed, but I remember the various messes were quite notable for the first 10 years of oysters existence.