Fare Groups Question

[Chris Bagnall]

Hello all,

Over the last few weeks, I have been seeing some new NLCs appearing in ticket data.  These appear to be fare groups around London, although they do not appear in the fare group member data from RDM.  I am attempting to map these onto stations.

The first set of these are boundary zones:

004100 - London Boundary Zone 2

004200 - London Boundary Zone 3

004300 - London Boundary Zone 4

004400 - London Boundary Zone 5

007200 - London Boundary Zone 6

An explanation of these along with a few stations from each fare group can be found here:

https://www.southeasternrailway.co.uk/ticket-types/tickets-explained/boundary-zone-fares

My question for this set of fare groups is whether the zones mentioned here map onto the stations for the normal London zones?

The next set are the Capitalcard zones:

002700 - Travelcard Zone 1 (Capitalcard Zone 1)

002800 - Travelcard Zone 2 (Capitalcard Zone 2)

002900 - Travelcard Zone 3 (Capitalcard Zone 3A)

003000 - Travelcard Zone 4 (Capitalcard Zone 3B)

003100 - Travelcard Zone 5 (Capitalcard Zone 3C)

007100 - London Travelcard Zone 6

Do these also map onto the same stations that the normal London zones map onto?  What is the difference between these zones and the normal London zones (005100, 005200, 005300, 005400, 005900, 006000)?

Lastly, the Travelcard Zone 1 has the same NLC as "Headquarters Input Ttl Chiltern" on railwaycodes.org.uk.  Am I correct in assuming that the NLC no longer applies to this headquarters?

Cheers,

Chris

[Ian Sargent]

There is an overall shortage of usable NLCs, so those that are known to be redundant do get reallocated from time to time. Trouble is, the RailwayCodes website has a habit of showing both the old and new uses for such codes.

Here's another example:

Switzerland TOPS/STANOX and Lewisham DLR are both shown as NLC 087300

Best to treat that website as just 99% accurate.

[Chris Bagnall]

Hi Ian,

Thanks for the reply.  I agree that RailwayCodes doesn't always give us a definitive answer.  

The problem I have been having is that I have only found those codes on that website.  I do not see them in the CORPUS dataset, the fare group members/location associations data.  I have found references to the boundary zones in the fare group permitted stations data, but that doesn't tell me which stations make up the fare group, if that even is a relevant concept for these fare groups.

The website is useful, as I only saw 4-5 of those NLCs in the ticket data that I was examining.  Having the full set of potential fare groups has helped in forming my question.

Cheers,

Chris

[Mikey Whiston]

Hi Chris,

Spent some time sharding this exact logic recently for my Sentinel project. There's two distinct issues with the codes you provided. I can't help you with the first set of codes, but I can help you with the second set.

I found no alternative logic definitions for the London Boundary Zones, I think it's safe to say that you can alias the second set of codes to the first set unless your use case requires otherwise. This definitely isn't an optimal solution, but it's the only solution that comes to mind.

Attached is a document I've made of the stations that make up the Capitalcard zones.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1m-xiZY8svpp71E7BA5J5B3l94cZTtrdnumW3J08NBig/edit?tab=t.0

The methodology here is simple:
- We use the RSPS5045 data in order to read every LOCATION using the RJFAF777.LOC file.
- Every LOCATION has a ZONE_NO and ZONE_IND. If ZONE_NO is equal to the Capitalcard NLC, then you can be assured it's within that zone. This is different to how fare groups work, as this only appears in the raw LOCATION record.
- You can then use the ZONE_IND to determine the zone of the location.

As long as ZONE_NO matches what we're looking for, we can conclude it's associated with that Capitalcard Zone. This method does not work for the Boundary Zones - definitely on my bucket list for figuring that part out.
The document was made from the RJFAF777 data. As it was programmatically generated using the data, the result is 100% deterministic - but let me know if anything's meaningfully missing or potentially incorrect.

If you'd like to verify, you can look at the ZONE_META column of the table:
- The first two digits are the county code, whether that be 00 or 01.
- The next two characters are the PTE code (making an educated guess here that GL stands for Greater London!)
- The next 4 characters are the NLC code associated with ZONE_NO, this is our key for identifying London zonal data.
- The next 2 characters are the zone index, representing either Zone 1, Zone 2, ..., Zone 6.

Best regards,

Mikey Whiston Systems Architect | Security Researcher mi...@mikeywhiston.dev mikeywhiston.dev

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[Chris Bagnall]

Hi Mikey,

Thanks for all of those details.  I will take a look in greater detail tomorrow.  I think for the first pass, I will use your data directly.  For the second pass, I will generate a delta comparing what I have in my database against the RSPS5045 data directly, as that will be of greater use in the future.  If there are any issues, I will mention it here.

Thanks,

Chris

[Chris Bagnall]

Hi again Mikey,

I've been through your document and here's my list of oddities.

Some of the Capitalcard zones contain fare groups (e.g. Travelcard Zone 2 explicitly contains W Hampstead Stations).  Here is the list of those which I spotted:

• 025800
• 026200
• 026300
• 026500
• 044900
• 078200
• 107200
• 445200
• 993400

Generally, if a fare group appears in the Capitalcard zone, then the stations that make up the fare group appear in the zone as well.  I found a few exceptions though:

• 002700 - 524600
• 002700 - 559700
• 007100 - 078000
• 007100 - 078100
• 007100 - 078300

Cheers,

Chris