Thanks, claim submitted. The reason I ended up on the delayed train was another delay on the Overground with the 1509 Clapton to Liverpool Street being cancelled. Maybe I should submit another claim to Overground and then get accused of two claims on one journey.
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Delay Repay claims rejected
- Thread starter yorkie
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I'm not sure what you're doing here. What have you claimed from SWR? Clapton to Martins Heron or Waterloo to Martins Heron? What was your actual intended itinerary?
AlterEgo
Veteran Member
Your claim is not therefore with SWR but with London Overground, who caused the initial delay. You cannot claim twice.
Tazi Hupefi
Member
I think when I looked, London Overground doesn’t offer Delay Repay in the same way either.
Haywain
Veteran Member
- Joined
- 3 Feb 2013
- Messages
- 15,118
That is just bad luck.
Indeed, TFL, including Overground, only compensate if the delay is over 30 minutes. I claimed the delay from Waterloo to Martins Heron. Since they are giving me 12.5% of the whole travel card cost to some extent that compensates for the extra delay on the Overground.
Nova1
Member
Had a strange experience with West Midlands Railway again.
My daily journey is very simple, usually an Anytime Day Return between Henley-In-Arden and Stratford-Upon-Avon with a 16-17 railcard.
Last week, my train arrived at Henley-In-Arden already running seven minutes late, then was held at a red signal for 20 minutes outside Stratford-Upon-Avon. Arrived into SAV 29 minutes late.
So, I go and claim delay repay, takes until today to come around, and of course "we didn't find you were delayed by more than 15 minutes"... which is strange as it was literally 29 minutes late.
Appeal time. Wrote in the appeal that the train was 7 minutes late at Henley-In-Arden but arrived into Stratford-Upon-Avon 29 minutes late. The appeal was approved and I was paid for a 30 minute delay (even though the delay was 29 minutes)
Some of my claims are paid almost instantly, so I'm guessing that simple cases can be dealt with by the computer, with more complex cases getting looked at by a human. But how did they manage to somehow not find more than 15 minute of delay on a service that quite clearly ran late? No other operators are involved, this is a simple A->B journey...
My daily journey is very simple, usually an Anytime Day Return between Henley-In-Arden and Stratford-Upon-Avon with a 16-17 railcard.
Last week, my train arrived at Henley-In-Arden already running seven minutes late, then was held at a red signal for 20 minutes outside Stratford-Upon-Avon. Arrived into SAV 29 minutes late.
So, I go and claim delay repay, takes until today to come around, and of course "we didn't find you were delayed by more than 15 minutes"... which is strange as it was literally 29 minutes late.
Appeal time. Wrote in the appeal that the train was 7 minutes late at Henley-In-Arden but arrived into Stratford-Upon-Avon 29 minutes late. The appeal was approved and I was paid for a 30 minute delay (even though the delay was 29 minutes)
Some of my claims are paid almost instantly, so I'm guessing that simple cases can be dealt with by the computer, with more complex cases getting looked at by a human. But how did they manage to somehow not find more than 15 minute of delay on a service that quite clearly ran late? No other operators are involved, this is a simple A->B journey...
bigfats
Member
I've had this before where a claim was rejected when held just outside the station. I suspect their system counted the arrival time as being when you stopped at the red signal.
Class800
Established Member
I think they sometimes rig it a bit by taking the time one chain short of the station!
Do you have any evidence to support this?
Class800
Established Member
I've been told by experts it is often measured not to the station but to something just before the station, which seems dodgy to me
Class800
Established Member
happened to me too davews. It's allowed practice, but not very moral. If you're moved from the on the hour to the half past for example, that should be half an hour, regardless of arriving fractionally early, which may have happened anyway.
AlterEgo
Veteran Member
You mean it was reduced to 29 minutes because you were 29 minutes delayed?
One could argue that early arrivals should be disregarded for delay repay claims. Imagine being on an hourly service after one train was cancelled. It arrives ten minutes early, however you're still delayed by an hour as you've rearranged your pick up to be at the timetabled new arrival time.
Class800
Established Member
mmh I agree they should be but rules not written that way unfortunately, I think it's pretty sneaky with the 1 minute early running
100andthirty
Member
Especially when departure and arrival times are estimates based on signal berth occupancy and certainly not measured wheel start to wheel stop/doors released time.
AlterEgo
Veteran Member
I’d scrap the entire regime if it were up to me.
py_megapixel
Established Member
You mean abolish delay repay? Or abolish early arrivals? Not quite clear how you'd do the latter, or why the former would be a good idea.
It's absolutely moral, as is paying against the public timetable rather than the working (I've had many half hour late trains come into Newcastle 28 late because of that effect). The rules are clear - the payout is for the delay in the journey measured as the difference between the timetable time of arrival, and the actual time of arrival.
The two edge cases which (especially if combined) can lead to injustice are poor use of signalling offsets to calculate actual arrival time, and failure to allow time for door release. I would hope that any reasonable operator would err on the side of generosity at the threshold if there's a likelihood that one or both is involved, but any system is going to have it's limitations.
Good question. There shouldn't be!
But some companies (e.g. West Midlands Trains) don't seem to publish a customer service email address.
I can see a class action claim against multiple train companies being a viable proposition if this nonsense continues.
Any such ideas are best proposed in the Speculative Ideas section (anyone doing so is welcome to post a link from here)
py_megapixel
Established Member
Just to clarify: when you say there "shouldn't", do you mean that is what you believe the official position to be currently (even if in practice not all TOCs are behaving accordingly) - or is it what, in your opinion, you would like it to be?
They do publish a freepost address for delay repay claims though, which is what I made mine to before, having discovered the shortcomings of their online form. I printed the paper form, and enclosed the tickets.
I assume I will be contacted even if they reject the claim? Do they usually contact by email or post (details for both were requested on the form)?
You mean you were delayed for 29 minutes and paid for a 29-minute delay?
Them's the breaks, as they say.
Your claim was that they deliberately do it to reduce the payout which isn’t true. It might be poor practise but it is down to how the system is setup rather than going out of their way to save a few quid. They do this in other ways as seen in the rest of this thread.
Your journey with regard to delay repay ends at the end of your ticket or tickets. Anything after that is not the concern nor the responsibility of the railway. If you are delayed by 29 minutes due to an early arrival then you have been delayed less and are due less. A completely variable scale at 1 minute intervals would solve this but would be and even bigger farce. Crucially ……….
For me, if a train has genuinely managed to get ahead of schedule and arrives one minute early then fair enough, that's bad luck and you only get to claim for the smaller amount. But what annoys me is when there is very obviously padding in the timetable such that an "on time" train always arrives a minute or two early, day in, day out, every single day. It's hard to believe that this is anything other than an attempt to fiddle the numbers.
e.g. https://www.realtimetrains.co.uk/service/gb-nr:G12891/2021-06-21/detailed is timetabled to have 8 minutes to get from Cambridge North to its final stop in Cambridge. Why?
I don't know of an easy way to automatically show how often this train arrives early in Cambridge, but my attempt to manually count based on https://www.recenttraintimes.co.uk/...tSpr=RT&ArrGph=ArrGph&MxScDu=&MxSvAg=&MnScCt= shows that this service has arrived early in Cambridge on 62 out of the last 70 weekdays.
e.g. https://www.realtimetrains.co.uk/service/gb-nr:G12891/2021-06-21/detailed is timetabled to have 8 minutes to get from Cambridge North to its final stop in Cambridge. Why?
I don't know of an easy way to automatically show how often this train arrives early in Cambridge, but my attempt to manually count based on https://www.recenttraintimes.co.uk/...tSpr=RT&ArrGph=ArrGph&MxScDu=&MxSvAg=&MnScCt= shows that this service has arrived early in Cambridge on 62 out of the last 70 weekdays.
There are far worse 'offenders' than that. TfW services from South Wales to Manchester frequently have 5 minutes' public differential added to the arrival time.
This means the trains can be shown as "overtaken" by the stopping trains between Stockport and Manchester, even though in fact it's the TfW train that will be running Fast Line and therefore doing the overtaking!
In the specific instance of the train from Cambridge North to Cambridge that you quote, the published departure / arrival times are 17:39 - 17:47, giving the 8 minutes you instance.
Cambridge North is shown as a single arrival and departure time of 17:39, whereas the train is actually scheduled there 17:39 1/2 to 17:40 1/2.
The WTT arrival time is 17:46 but the published time is 17:47. This "Public Book" time of adding 1 or 2 minutes to the scheduled arrival time is in the gift of the TOC, and is there specifically to absorb any late running earlier in the journey. Or looked at another way <cynic mode on> it exists blatantly to massage the timekeeping statistics <cynic mode off>. Personally I think a small amount of padding at the end of a journey is reasonable. In this case it is 1 minutes at the end of an 80+ minute journey from Norwich. Bear in mind also that terminating trains cannot finish on a half minute, so there is occasionally an additional half minute in the schedules to round up the arrival time to a whole number.
Likewise for an ATW train that has come all the way from West Wales with a journey time in excess of 6 hours, a Public Book allowance of 5 minutes seems proportionate to me. As a rule of thumb, a minute per hour of journey time feels reasonable and proportionate. It only looks odd if happen to focus on the last two stops.
bb21
Emeritus Moderator
- Joined
- 4 Feb 2010
- Messages
- 24,151
Your experts are not so much experts if that is what they believe.
They are not measured to those locations. They are measured at those locations, then an average offset added or subtracted. Of course this does mean if you take the absolute wheel start/stop times there will be some winners and some losers, but they on the whole will tend to even out, and the proportion of people affected will generally be very small as only people affected will be those close to the thresholds between different payment bands. These times will be regularly recalibrated.
Nothing stopping you complaining if the outcome is wrong, but this is a good solution based on infrastructure capability across the network. There may be better local solutions, eg. GPS (which brings its own problems), but it is difficult to have a better common standard that is applicable to all locations.
Super Hans
Member
The Avanti portal only allows you to upload one ticket image. If you uploaded a picture of your train ticket, then uploaded a picture of the upgrade, the picture of the upgrade has deleted the picture of the ticket, in which case the staff can only see the picture of your upgrade, which isn't a valid ticket by itself. Ticket images need to be combined into one image and uploaded as one file.