It strikes me that everything was rather more straightforward when the 'timetable' of what services 'ought' to be running, was something you could pick up in a printed format, or peruse on a poster at the station.
Getting rid of printed timetables and trying to make everyone rely on journey planners makes this sort of thing much easier to get away with.
My perception is that almost no-one uses anything other than:
a) a journey planner (in most cases we can be even more specific: Trainline or Google Maps)
b) local knowledge of a particular train they often catch
I'd assume most people who aren't enthusiasts or travel planners would only resort to a PDF timetable in a post-hoc dispute with the railway company.
From the perspective of that dispute, or a travel planner, it's probably true that...
Eh? They still produce pdf timetables they just don't pointlessly print them out. The idea that having a printed out pdf timetable would prevent them making changes like this is bonkers I'm afraid to say. ... However the suggestion that the loss of printed timetables could have made a difference is bonkers.
...in that a PDF is clearly just as stolid, dependable, and apparently "official" as a record of the ordinary timetable. However, I think MikeWM and AdamWW are basically right about this cultural shift:
I think the biggest difference is that the way of getting a timetable used to be to get hold of a printed one, so any later changes had to be well publicised because lots of people would be using copies of the original timetable, and presumably this would also be an incentive not to keep changing things.
Now, since most people just use journey planners, or maybe look at a pdf on the web, it's easy to make changes and much harder to compare to an earlier version to see what's changed.
This makes it much easier for the TOC to get rid of people by instructing its customer services representatives to stonewall them. If the Twitter representative or the person replying to your e-mails is adamant that
"Hi Mark, no train was scheduled to run at 23:04 today due to staff shortages. It's important to check before you travel. As Delay Repay is based on the published timetable, I'm afraid no refund is due ^AH"
or whatever, then the (otherwise-beneficial and inevitable regardless) shift from using paper timetables to Trainline
does make it more likely this will
work. Some won't know they've been shafted. Some who remember what the planner said the night before or who "always get the 17:04" won't think to look for a PDF when making their claim. People who aren't up for a fight or for jumping through hoops don't push it further and the company saves £££. I'm not convinced it would have been so easy to fob people off when most people were looking at the same printed timetable!
