Hello all,
First things first, thank you all for taking the time to respond to me and provide guidance in regards to this situation in which I have found myself in.
This situation is now resolved, and I will confirm costs etc. further down.
There have been several back and forth with my case over the past few weeks – even though I have at each time apologised for my error and offered to pay in order to mitigate the case without prejudice. It went through to a litigation lawyer who was I am sure very good at his job.
During the radio silence from my time, I reached out to a friend of mine who works for XC, who advised the crews actions were extreme and would not happen normally, and he confirmed that whilst the crew are NOT on a commission based role for how many people they can pull up, they do have targets to identify persons traveling unwillingly.
My friend also spoke to his colleague within the prosecution team within XC who was aware of the case, and similarly thought it was a complete joke, given the nature of the journey and the locations, but as it had already been passed through to TIL, there was nothing that could be done.....shame really.
Furthermore I spoke to a friend who is high up in another train company based within the West Midlands who advised that as a rule of thumb train crew are incredibly lenient within his organisation and would only look to take details and prosecute etc when there is no offer of payment.
I had to pay £261.90 to have this case dismissed so I did not face any further action.
That’s £261.90 for a simple mistake and instead of grovelling and admitting fault in the first instance this was sent to a litigation lawyer for TIL who basically did nothing but copy and paste some verbiage from what I can imagine is an already scripted data base of responses.
So it works out at £3.40 for the train ticket, and £258.50 for some dude to sit there and play god.
Its done and out the way now, however I will be making contact with XC in order to retrieve the CCTV footage and the handwritten note completed by the train crew, and I will compare that with what has been bought forward by TIL (especially in regards to there being no record of me offering to pay). I suspect that the handwritten note has been typed up and my comments RE paying removed.
Oh well…. Moral of the story,
Buy your ticket
If you are unsure, ask staff
Thanks again all… if I do get anywhere with the request for data and what not, I will happily share the details
Hope you all have a great weekend and so forth
Now if you will excuse me, I am off to live on water and ASDA 12p noodles for the rest of the month.
First things first, thank you all for taking the time to respond to me and provide guidance in regards to this situation in which I have found myself in.
This situation is now resolved, and I will confirm costs etc. further down.
There have been several back and forth with my case over the past few weeks – even though I have at each time apologised for my error and offered to pay in order to mitigate the case without prejudice. It went through to a litigation lawyer who was I am sure very good at his job.
During the radio silence from my time, I reached out to a friend of mine who works for XC, who advised the crews actions were extreme and would not happen normally, and he confirmed that whilst the crew are NOT on a commission based role for how many people they can pull up, they do have targets to identify persons traveling unwillingly.
My friend also spoke to his colleague within the prosecution team within XC who was aware of the case, and similarly thought it was a complete joke, given the nature of the journey and the locations, but as it had already been passed through to TIL, there was nothing that could be done.....shame really.
Furthermore I spoke to a friend who is high up in another train company based within the West Midlands who advised that as a rule of thumb train crew are incredibly lenient within his organisation and would only look to take details and prosecute etc when there is no offer of payment.
I had to pay £261.90 to have this case dismissed so I did not face any further action.
That’s £261.90 for a simple mistake and instead of grovelling and admitting fault in the first instance this was sent to a litigation lawyer for TIL who basically did nothing but copy and paste some verbiage from what I can imagine is an already scripted data base of responses.
So it works out at £3.40 for the train ticket, and £258.50 for some dude to sit there and play god.
Its done and out the way now, however I will be making contact with XC in order to retrieve the CCTV footage and the handwritten note completed by the train crew, and I will compare that with what has been bought forward by TIL (especially in regards to there being no record of me offering to pay). I suspect that the handwritten note has been typed up and my comments RE paying removed.
Oh well…. Moral of the story,
Buy your ticket
If you are unsure, ask staff
Thanks again all… if I do get anywhere with the request for data and what not, I will happily share the details
Hope you all have a great weekend and so forth
Now if you will excuse me, I am off to live on water and ASDA 12p noodles for the rest of the month.