Southeastern trains have followed FGW by starting to accept Solo and
Visa Electron cards at their ticket offices and ticket machines, but
not on-train.

FGW have installed a bank of new ticket machines at Ealing Broadway
that can handle Oyster transaction. The software seems to be the same
as on the London Overground machines.

On 30 May, 15:41, Matthew Dickinson 
wrote:
>
> FGW have installed a bank of new ticket machines at Ealing Broadway
> that can handle Oyster transaction. The software seems to be the same
> as on the London Overground machines.

They are the Shere models, as used on London Overground (LO). As you
say the software appears to be the same. I think this is the first
example of a TOC other than LO (though they aren't really a TOC per
se) adding Oyster functionality to their self-service ticket machines.

When I was at Ealing Broadway recently a number of the machines had
paper notices attached saying that the Oyster facility wasn't working.

Incidentally I've had a problem with these Shere machines (both the
new FGW ones at Ealing Bdwy and the LO ones elsewhere) when using one
of my Oyster cards - they simply don't read it whatsoever. I'm
guessing that there might be a minor fault in that particular Oyster
card (e.g. one of the tiny internal antennae might be broken), but
I've had no problems using it elsewhere at all, whether at LU ticket
machines, ticket offices (both LU and NR ones), ticket gates,
standlone Oyster validators, on buses or having it scanned by ticket
inspectors. Perhaps the Oyster pad on the Shere machines is too
sensitive or not powerful enough or something.

By the by have LO managed to get the Oyster pad working on their
Scheidt & Bachmann ticket machines yet?

On 30 May, 15:41, Matthew Dickinson 
wrote:
> Southeastern trains have followed FGW by starting to accept Solo and
> Visa Electron cards at their ticket offices and ticket machines, but
> not on-train.

Because Electron & Solo require a real-time connection to your account
to check current balance, and that can't be got by theon-train
equipment.

On Sun, 1 Jun 2008 04:51:55 -0700 (PDT), Chris
 wrote:

>Because Electron & Solo require a real-time connection to your account
>to check current balance, and that can't be got by theon-train
>equipment.

It could quite easily be done by use of mobile phone technology - but
it would be expensive, and more importantly, very slow.

Neil

-- 
Neil Williams
Put my first name before the at to reply.

On 1 Jun, 14:54, wensleyd...@pacersplace.org.uk (Neil Williams) wrote:
> On Sun, 1 Jun 2008 04:51:55 -0700 (PDT), Chris
>
>  wrote:
> >Because Electron & Solo require a real-time connection to your account
> >to check current balance, and that can't be got by theon-train
> >equipment.
>
> It could quite easily be done by use of mobile phone technology - but
> it would be expensive, and more importantly, very slow.
>
> Neil
>
> --
> Neil Williams
> Put my first name before the at to reply.

Quite. Which is exactly why they don't do this.

In message , at 13:54:10 on Sun, 
1 Jun 2008, Neil Williams  remarked:
>>Because Electron & Solo require a real-time connection to your account
>>to check current balance, and that can't be got by theon-train
>>equipment.
>
>It could quite easily be done by use of mobile phone technology - but
>it would be expensive, and more importantly, very slow.

Very slow indeed if the train was out of phone coverage - which seems to 
happen a lot.
-- 
Roland Perry