Monday’s Friday Reads – 18 November 2024

The inside story of the Transport for London cyberattack (London Centric)

Green signal given for first UK co-operatively owned railway service (The Guardian)

Caltrain’s electrification project is paying off big-time (SFGate)

Here’s when the new AirTrain monorail will be up and running at Newark airport (nj.com)

Why You Can’t Travel Between Hawaii’s Islands by Boat: Video (RealLifeLore)

Thailand Eyes Congestion Fee to Cut Bangkok Pollution & Traffic (CityLab)

Stuttgart 21, Europe’s Most Controversial Rail Project: Video (DW News)

Planned Mount Fuji light rail line could transport 3 million hikers / year to trails (Japan Today)

3 comments

  1. “There is an expectation among TfL staff that millions of pounds of overcharged fares may never be reclaimed by passengers”

    I got charged over £54 for a single days off-peak travel and I can’t say there has been a huge level of interest from the TfL hotline in putting it back in my bank account…

  2. Yeah, my favorite nit pick that I drag up way too often is how cumbersome the refund process at least was a (long) while ago.
    You had to call a UK phone number, and you could only get the refund deposited to your Oyster card. Completely useless if you realize that the guy who sold you a week zone 1-6 travel card on each of two Oyster cards put the wrong days on one of the cards, so one card expired too early, and you are leaving your UK vacation in two days. Like sure, in theory it might had been possible to call the Oyster phone number and have the missing day put in as a day pass and avoid one single fare for bus travel from the hotel to the railway station you already have a ticket from to the airport. That would had nominally increased the residual value on the oyster card, but in the end it would still had cost a paper day travel card for the missing day (as the travel on that day included trips where the PAYG didn’t apply, IIRC using mainline rail to go to the Kew steam museum).

    I actually find it surprising that no-one bothered dragging TfL to court over this, especially since UK was an EU member at the time. Perhaps TfL would had paid out claimed extra expenses to a regular bank account if a customer would had threatened to drag them to court.

    In hindsight it’s one of those situations where it would had been great if I had paid using a credit card and just used the charge back feature, having the bank withhold the same amount that we had to pay extra. I think that this is a thing that the general public wasn’t much aware of back in the days when most transactions (at least over here in Sweden) were done using cash. Might had been different elsewhere though.

  3. “CalTrain” – Someone tell the UK Treasury?
    { Refers back to the Shenfield article, as well, of course }

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.