Great Western Coffee Shop

Hello. On Sunday evening I bought a ticket from Didcot Parkway to Paddington for the 6:48 am train on Monday morning. The website sold me on off-peak ticket for £27. Seemed a bit weird: i'd have thought that 6:48am on a Monday morning was about as Peak as you can get, but the mobile ticket clearly had that train time written on it (although it threw an error when I tried to reserve a seat).

I rolled up at the ticket barriers, and they wouldn't open. The guy on the gate wouldn't let me through, since I only had an off-peak ticket which wasn't valid. So the GWR web site sold me an invalid ticket. There were other people at the barriers having the same problem. I bought a new ticket to complete my journey, and called GWR web sales afterwards - the guy on the phone says that all his systems indicate indicate that journey is off-peak, and my ticket should have been valid. But he did agree to refund my £27.

I've just looked now for Friday trains out of London. Website saying off-peak tickets are valid on every train, although I know for a fact some trains are peak only. What's going on? Looks like there's a fault on the online ticket buying system. Can anyone shed any light on this mystery, please?

There is a fault with the uploading of restriction codes which should be resolved in the next 72 hours.   In the meantime staff have been asked to "show discretion".  Although I suspect that note went out after your encounter.

That would be uploading as in by GWR to nationalrail, I think - restriction code P7 has simply vanished off the system (as made visible by BRFares). So the OJP also thinks off-peak tickets DID-PAD apply all day, and presumably all other JP and sales machinery does too. The text for the code is still there, but then I'd already concluded that comes from a different source. Maybe the single computer at GWR towers that does the processing and uploads has died...

Not the first time this has happened at some time leading up towards timetable or fare changes; indeed it seems to happen more often than not in recent years.