Passenger reimbursement resulting from delays. Who pays it?

[DavidH]

That's a good point, people often don't leave enough time for delays and then seemingly try to blame their lateness on someone else (which certainly isn't fair, but is common enough behaviour regardless), but ticket booking systems often automatically give you only 10 minutes or so to change trains - so it isn't always the traveller's fault.

 

Playing Devil's advocate, why should travellers be expected to routinely add extra time "just in case" a train is delayed? I'd certainly travel on an earlier service if the appointment was important, such as an interview, but for day-to-day journeys, are we really suggesting that everyone must plan their journey as if the train is going to be late? In the 21st century? (And at our eye-watering walk-on prices?)

 

When most people have cars that will do the same journey in comfort without e.g. hanging about on a cold station waiting for a connection, might be packed when it turns up, etc.?

 

Regardless of whether the train company's legal responsibility ends at getting you to your final station, I'd say they have a duty to look after their "customers", even if that means laying on taxis when the last train has arrived too late for someone to get home. When the alternative is turfing someone out into the cold at (say) 1am long after the buses have stopped, and saying "see you, you're on your own now" - is that good business practice?

 

Next time that person is liable to give up on the train and just go back to driving.

 

Sneering at people for "not leaving enough time" is pointless - everyone has, at some point, left things "a bit tight". I won't believe anyone who says otherwise!

 

Actually, my experience of delays and problems over the last 5 years has been pretty much all positive on East Coast, Northern, Transpennine and CrossCountry - assistance from cheerful staff, making sure I could travel on the next train or making other arrangements without fuss. One great Northern guard managed to get me on the Whitby connection at Middlesborough when I'd been stupid and sat on the wrong train at Darlington (long story). And when the early morning Thameslink services were cancelled a couple of years ago, a Eurostar clerk rebooked me without question on a later train.

[Kenton]

I've yet to see a convincing argument for why a privatised railway that carries more passengers than BR ever did on more or less the same network is costing us far more both as passengers and as taxpayers  than BR did even pre-Beeching when it was running services into virtually every small town in the country .

Inflation.

 

I think if a somewhat simple comparison is made between the cost of a house in London now to when BR existed and a commuter rail fair, I think they wouldn't be a big difference. The costs of everything from staff wages, to stock to maintenance has risen considerably. Why is profit such a bad thing - those who risk their money and your pension funds need a return on the investment. Or do people really think that we can borrow money from the markets, spend it on free rail fares for all, and never pay the debt back?

 

BR days always seems to be viewed though rose tinted glasses. I for one certainly want to go back to that. Even so there is room for improvement on the existing system.

 

 

As to the argument about folk "going back" to their cars instead of putting up with inconvenience or being unable to plan their journey with "reasonable" delays. Sure they might, but life isn't that simple. There are many reasons for making the transport choice and it is not always down to potential train delays. Accidents and road works are possibly far more common to the motorist than those on the railways (a very just reason to travel by train in the first place. But do you hear of motorists whining about compensation - certainly not receiving any. The main reason, I would argue, for selecting car over train is simply convenience of point A to B, most of us do not live at a station or have our destination anywhere near one. The main reason for selecting the train over the car is that the train, despite moans, is significantly cheaper than the cost of the car, even more so when the subsidy element made by taxpayers is included.

[Pacific231G]

Inflation.

 

I think if a somewhat simple comparison is made between the cost of a house in London now to when BR existed and a commuter rail fair, I think they wouldn't be a big difference. The costs of everything from staff wages, to stock to maintenance has risen considerably. Why is profit such a bad thing - those who risk their money and your pension funds need a return on the investment. Or do people really think that we can borrow money from the markets, spend it on free rail fares for all, and never pay the debt back?

 

BR days always seems to be viewed though rose tinted glasses. I for one certainly want to go back to that. Even so there is room for improvement on the existing system.

 

 

As to the argument about folk "going back" to their cars instead of putting up with inconvenience or being unable to plan their journey with "reasonable" delays. Sure they might, but life isn't that simple. There are many reasons for making the transport choice and it is not always down to potential train delays. Accidents and road works are possibly far more common to the motorist than those on the railways (a very just reason to travel by train in the first place. But do you hear of motorists whining about compensation - certainly not receiving any. The main reason, I would argue, for selecting car over train is simply convenience of point A to B, most of us do not live at a station or have our destination anywhere near one. The main reason for selecting the train over the car is that the train, despite moans, is significantly cheaper than the cost of the car, even more so when the subsidy element made by taxpayers is included.

And you don't think roads are also subsidised by taxpayers? As a motorist I'm my own operator on a system I haven't paid direct access charges to use and the road network has so much redundancy built into it that getting round road works and accidents is usually fairly straightforward if tedious. 

 

My question though was why the real cost of such a commodity item as an ordinary turn up and go ticket has increased so much on certain routes compared with the marginal cost of driving and why that cost is so much higher than in other European countries whose railways are used far less intensively and so should be seeing a far poorer return on investment.

 

Profit isn't a bad thing per se,  in fact it's the only thing that motivates a purely commercial organisation, but for the country it's a means to a public end not the reason for the railway network to exist. So you do need a system in which the total amount of profit as a proportion of the cost to the end user doesn't get out of hand and that can happen in a fragmented system. Using commercial organisations to run a public service is never going to be straightforward because the motivations are different though using public organisations to do the same is also not straightforward as they tend to be self serving and blown around by whatever political winds happen to be blowing. I'm not sure though that if you sat down to invent a really bad way of running Britain's passenger railways you could have done much worse than the Major government did.

 

I don't view BR through rose tinted spectacles- I made far too many journeys on it for that-  but it was far more efficiently managed than other European national railways. It needed to be though to keep the railways running with such limited, uncertain and short term investment by governments that tended to see the railways as a liability.

[Kenton]

Sure roads are paid for by taxpayers - through the MoT; road tax; VAT on cars, repairs, maintenance; (car parking, etc) but primarily by the fuel duty and VAT (the tax on a tax).

 

We can agree that the particular privatisation with strings attached was/is such a contrived system that it is a wonder that anything runs.

 

The trouble with making comparisons with europe is that they had one big benefit - we bombed the hell out of them - so they had a relatively clean sheet to work on, They are also more sparsely populated and for example in the case of France radiating new track to the borders has purpose of interconnecting other european countries whereas HS2 is about connecting London with the hinterland. Really not much benefit for those in the south/west.

[Norm81]

My understanding is if you bought one ticket that covered both parts of the journey then "Main Line Rail" should allow you to travel on the next available train. If however you bought two seperate tickets for the two parts of the journey, it's up to you to make sure you get to the starting point of the "Main Line Rail" journey in good time for the specified train by whatever means; "Main Line Rail" have no obligation to take you, and you have no claim against "Local Rail" for the missed connection...

I had bought one ticket, and allowed 30 minutes to catch the connection, so it looks like I would've been ok. As it happened we were only 20 minutes late so I made the connection. I'm not interested in compensation, only avoiding ending up out of pocket due to a delay that is out of my control.

[Jim Martin]

Sure roads are paid for by taxpayers - through the MoT; road tax; VAT on cars, repairs, maintenance; (car parking, etc) but primarily by the fuel duty and VAT (the tax on a tax).

 

Roads are paid for through general taxation. there's no inherent link between tax that happens to be paid on motoring-related activities and road expenditure. Also, "Road Tax" doesn't exist at all: Vehicle Excise Duty, which is presumably what you're alluding to, is one of a number of taxes which might be described as "social engineering taxes", in that they're supposed to provide an economic incentive to certain behaviours (environmental taxes like aggregates duty and landfill tax could be seen in the same sort of light). VED banding is based on exhaust emissions in order to incentivise the use of fuel efficient cars.

 

Jim

[Kenton]

Roads are paid for through general taxation. there's no inherent link between tax that happens to be paid on motoring-related activities and road expenditure.

£5 billion into the government's tax pocket £4 billion spent from that pocket on roads (figure's plucked from nowhere just to illustrate the point)

 

All taxes - even income tax - are social engineering. The government wasting money on projects, that if they were accounted for, the majority of the population would not agree to.

 

Perhaps if governments had to be more honest and public in their accounting more of the electorate would engage in the process. That would be from top level departmental allocation down to the individual department. It is not micro managing, it is more about transparency and public understanding of what the faceless bureaucratic machine of government is doing in their name.

 

Something like: £100 billion raised in taxes (general pool):

£55 billion paying off the debt, borrowing from other countries

£20 billion on NHS

£15 billion on social "do good", poor relief, caring for the "needy"

£10 billion on Defence and political adventures in foreign lands

£5 billion on Education

£3 billion net on the European Project

£3 billion on Transport

£1 billion on "homeland security" - police, border control, revenue collection, justice, ...

£0.1 billion on "Overseas Gift Aid", financing foreign dictators, charities, ...

etc

 

Oh dear have we overspent there? Never mind lets simply borrow some more, the next government (generation) will pay it back.

 

The trouble is that we put "politicians" in power that all seem to think that it is simply someone else's money they are spending and there is plenty more in the pot for their latest project. I have no issue with the "elected" government of the day moving the budgets around from one department to another just that they should be honest about what they are doing.

 

It would certainly knock this debate on the head - if people could vote for public spending on railways against filling in potholes in the road or a new bypass for a remote village in Cumbria.

[Mod5]

Politics, Religion and Sex are considered OFF LIMIT subjects, frequently these subject cause friction between people who wouldn't normally fall out with each other over any modelling subject.

[Padishar Creel]

Thanks to all that replied, I think that I can deduce what would be need to be done.

 

I had written in my original post that the announcments before departure list all tickets which are NOT valid, which gave me the impression that the TOCs only look after their own and "to hell with everyone else". That is why I was interested to see (from locals) what would be the course of action if someone was caused financial hardship in a situation like this in todays "not my problem, mate" society.

 

What is to be remembered amongst RMWebbers is that many people who travel by train do not have the disposable income that can support shrugging off a 60mile taxi fare late at night or a night in a hotel (if there was one at the destiniation of the ticket) no matter what Kenton writes.

 

The topic has in my eyes run its course and I respectfully ask the moderators to lock it before it turns into a mud-fight.

 

Again thanks to all that replied with useful information.

 

Es gruesst

PC