Basically, the short of this is its outrageous customer service and absolutely unacceptable.
Dare I say it, I suspect the problem on these boards is all too often, critique comes from staff or former staff who rarely actually pay for the service they receive.
Frankly, I would suggest the train crew should have taken more decisive actions. The customer service book stops with them. I can think of atleast 2 occasions where, as a guard, I refused to leave my trainload of customers at some backwater station until suitable alternative transport had arrived or support staff arrived. Yes it upsets control, but on both occasions I received recognition and praise from the customer service team and local management for doing the right thing.
I suppose, in part, it's a question of TOC policy, as I'm sure at some TOCs such behaviour would not be met with a sensible reaction, but at the same time, anything less is simply inadequate for customers. They should, at the very least, have a responsibile representative from the company to assist, and not rely on twitter etc to get someone to notice.
Often TOCs will forget how its competition behave, and it's for this reason they really need to up their game when things go wrong. I recently had a domestic flight delayed to the following day with a budget carrier, and their response to the disruption was nothing short of exemplary. The contrast to the cancelled train service we should have been on, which was simply notified by a text and the sentiment of "now go away and sort it yourself", couldn't be more stark.
This doesn’t rebut what I said whatsoever. The average price of a plane ticket bought in the UK is massively, massively higher than the average train ticket. I’d put my money on it being something like a factor of 10 or 20 higher, taking all the air ticket bookings made by British people today and all the railway tickets bought by British people today.
I am finding it amusing to see people believe the passenger care provisions in the airline industry are somehow superior to those on the British railway. To repeat, if you want the international rules governing airlines’ responsibilities to apply to the trains, the author’s son would receive a round sum of zero pounds and zero pence compensation and there is no guarantee of being accommodated waaaay out in the sticks.
Firstly, on the subject of specifically domestic air fares, I'm sorry but I'm also going to have to disagree with you. Most long distance journeys are cheaper or competitive by air, especially when booked well in advance. Short notice bookings also are broadly competitive. To suggest they're 10x more effectively implies that for every person paying £100 to take the train Kings Cross to Edinburgh (and at £100 that would still be an apex or off peak fare) there's numerous people paying £1000 to fly, which quite evidently is nonsense. Good luck even finding such an expensive air fare in economy.
In terms of care and compensation, firstly, airlines are required to provide care, which isn't a stipulation of NRCoC, except in a handful of extreme and ridiculously rare circumstances - so already, aviation is doing better.
You would only not be entitled to compensation for the ticket in the circumstances described above if they provided an alternative flight - which coupled with the care provided, should make for a reasonably well dealt with disruption incident.
None the less, this is mostly irrelevant as good provisions are made within the conditions of carriage. My main issue is TOCs repeated failures to actually honour those conditions in a timely fashion, never mind to simply do what's right by their customers.
