The Guardian opinion piece linked to is quite illuminating: bring actual human interaction back into the process. I trust the railways because I was fortunate to live near a small station with familiar ticket staff. I had faith that they would sell the correct ticket for my journey and also, whilst never tested, be in my corner if there was a dispute.
Whilst this intimate service might not be scalable in a business such as railways where most all people buy their tickets electronically, perhaps forum members have ideas? Of course a revision of the fare structure (in fact I would suggest a total reimagining of people's relationship with train travel) is the necessary long term solution.
Perhaps people would be willing to provide more of their own data to the ticketing agent (trainline, loco2, etc) if the data held on the system filters out inappropriate options for everyday transitions.
It is an interesting, and perhaps a valid point about the increased level of automation, certainly for some passengers at least. But people are getting more used to, indeed many now prefer automatic systems to human interaction (whether this is a good thing for society is of course another matter). For example you can now book a package holiday, arrange the transfer from the holiday, in-flight meals, seat selection & even check-in (which I'll be doing in the next couple of days for my next holiday, woohoo! (Sorry, got distracted there!)) without any human intervention whatsoever. In fact if you travel without checked luggage, the first human intervention you will have will be with the security staff at the airport! But all that said, having more staff available not only at stations & on trains, but over the telephones & help points employed by TOCs rather than contact centre providers would go a long way to offering a human face / voice.
As for automatic delay repay, properly done I would welcome this. However in order to give companies full confidence that it would be difficult to abuse, systems would need to be in place to make sure that claims were correctly made, not duplicated etc (no company simply opens up their financial systems without such). There's nothing too difficult in imagining how this would be done, for the standard paper, mobile & electronic tickets the ticket reference linked to a database of all the known delays, reason codes etc would make repayment where a card payment has been used easy enough, although M-Tickets would have to have been activated prior to the start of the delayed journey.
Abandon the blanket right for refund. Allow customers buying a ticket to add on travel insurance for a small surcharge when their journey is high stakes. Make this travel insurance easy to claim for more resources can be given to each claim because fewer people will be in a position to claim.
Its an interesting idea, but for the vast majority of journeys I really can't see people opting for it, even the riskier ones.
There is no doubt that rail travel is not winning the PR war quick enough. Rail travel used to have chronic reputation for customer service a couple of generations ago and to be fair it has made great strides. But the received wisdom that rail is not a customer focussed industry remains.
So how do we break the vicious circle of customers not trusting "the railway scene" and those within the scene not trusting the wider public? Again, my experience living in mid wales perhaps offers a solution. The local community rail partnership is an important part of the rail travel ecosystem. The CrP can evangelise rail travel in general and engage in myth busting on local social media for instance.
And these partnerships are exactly the sort of things than can start to improve both the customer experience & perceptions. We have one with Northern at my local station, there are regular engagements, open channels of communication & a little bit of goodwill on the part of the partnership group. We have had a number of small, but welcome improvements at Baildon & along with a proactive feedback loop members of the social media feed can see not only these changes occurring, but showing that they can in some small part have a say. It doesn't solve all of the wider problems, but does show that there are better ways of seeding change than bemoaning everything & anything on social media.