So I got a train to Manchester Piccadilly about a month ago, it was an hour late and the loudspeaker on the train said your ticket was eligible for a refund. I refunded it on trainline as I got off the train, and the ticket was no longer accessible and said “refund processing”. After some back and forward with the ticket inspector about this, I checked my email and the ticket was there, and was valid when scanned. Despite this he still wrote me up a travel incident report and I’ve been fined over £100 about this. Is there any way to dispute this as i did have a valid ticket. Thanks for any help
So the problem is that, whilst you've been led astray by the imprecise wording of the announcement (and even without that lots of people refer to "refunds" when they mean delay repay), this action looks like an
extremely common form of fare evasion. It's absolutely rife at the moment that people will travel and then hit refund on their app to get the ticket refunded when they're not entitled to a refund (or delay compensation) at all.
This means that you've got a quite a considerable hurdle to overcome in persuading the company that this was an honest mistake rather than attempting a common form of fare evasion.
I suggest that you write back to the company, explain what has happened that you heard an announcement talking about a refund, didn't realise that this was the wrong action in your circumstances, point to the train being delayed so it wasn't just something that you did out of the blue and explain that you now understand the difference between a refund and delay repay and certainly won't make the same mistake again.
How much was the ticket worth that you refunded?