1) The Advance ticket terms and conditions state that “If delays occur while travelling, you will be allowed to take the next available train(s) to complete your journey.”. Will the railway honour this with the spirit that it is clearly intended? Some have argued, incorrectly in my opinion, that this does not apply to the first train on your journey, only to subsequent missed connections.
90 or even 95% of the time, staff will either be pragmatic or there will be ticket acceptance etc. to allow the use of the next train, so it's not an issue. So in that sense, the railway then does honour that condition.
The problem is the 5 or 10% of cases where customers are told off, charged extra, issued with a Penalty Fare or even prosecuted. Even one such case is too many, but as we have seen here on the forum, it is a regular occurrence - we must bear in mind that we only see a tiny percentage of all such cases, so they cannot be dismissed as "isolated incidents".
2) The EU PRO rules state that you have to be delayed by more than an hour before the railway is obliged to re-route you to you destination. Surely “re-routing” means exactly what it says i.e. taking a train by a different route or operated by a different TOC, and not taking the next train operated by your booked TOC over the same route?
The anticipated delay has to be more than an hour, yes. There can be no doubt that re-routing includes travel on other operators, based on ECJ precedent from the (in this respect analogous) EU261 regulation.
The problem is that the industry has done absolutely nothing to train frontline staff on the rights that passengers have under the PRO, as it falsely believes that the NRCoT already caters to this. Even that is problematic, as whilst staff may have a passing acquaintance with the concept of the NRCoT, training on its contents is extremely limited.
Overall, a seismic shift in industry attitude would be needed to address the issues raised here. Unfortunately there is no sign that anyone in a position of authority is even aware of the problems, let alone that they acknowledge them or are taking steps to rectify them.