Having gone through the pfaff of buying a using my Railcard to buy a ticket and arriving at Hertford North to find it has an Oyster station I’m trying to follow these changes more closely.

A FOI request about dynamic pricing: https://tfl.gov.uk/corporate/transparency/freedom-of-informa...

The first stage of Project “Oval”: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/53-train-stations-to-bene...

Another post digesting the first stage: https://railsmartr.co.uk/expert-tips/what-is-project-oval/

One of the big successes for TfL was the introduction of the Oyster card, and the addition of contactless payments.

Removing the need for managing ticket purchase and validation.

And it works nicely for users such as me, automatically computing the fare and capping daily costs and so on. But it relies heavily on trusting the operator to do the right thing, and TfL is fairly benign...

Being aged I have a freedom pass. Fantastic access to all of London with one tap. For journeys into the wild outside London I use digital tickets which most gates seem to support via a QR code reader.