Delay Repay elegibility for Advance fares and rail replacement buses

[Scythus]

Hello,

Can I claim delay repay on a journey where part of the journey has been replaced with a rail replacement bus, but at the time of purchase the schedule did not have this listed, and the itinerary on the trainline receipt shows the journey ending an hour earlier?

I know you cannot claim for delays due to rail replacement busses where the replacement was in the schedule at time of booking, but can't find information about whether this is still the case if the delay is added later.

In this case it is a SWR train, and is the 16:35 from Waterloo to Southampton Central - originally arriving at 18:00, now scheduled for 18:52.

Thanks

 

[miklcct]

The timetable has been changed so any delay is claimable against the timetable in force today, either on a direct train diverted via Guildford or on a replacement bus via Basingstoke.

If you travel on the 16:35 train today, which is not your original train (which has been rescheduled to 15:54 from Waterloo diverted via Guildford), you will need to claim Delay Repay against the timetable in force today, which is 18:52 arrival.

 

[30907]

Yes, but you may have to be persistent with SW
If you actually caught the 1654, that was booked into SOU at 1900, actual 1909 - but only claim if you actually did so, obviously!

 

[Watershed]

It's a difficult one. As the delay didn't reach 60 minutes, you're not entitled to anything under the Passenger Rights and Obligations Regulation (PRO), which has no exclusions based on the timetable changing after booking.

Accordingly you're reliant on the National Rail Conditions of Travel (NRCoT) and SWR's Passenger Charter. The former purports to base all calculations of "delay" on the timetable as shown on National Rail Enquiries (NRE) at 10pm the night before travel (the so-called "Published Timetable of the Day" / PToD - which isn't published in any sense!). Similarly, SWR's Charter purports to exclude compensation where engineering work extends journey times.

The purported PToD exclusion has been discussed at length on previous threads. Suffice it to say that (in my view) the exclusion is, for multiple reasons including no actual notice being given to passengers of any change, not binding as it constitutes an unfair term in the context of a consumer contract.

By all means, feel free to submit a claim. But you will almost certainly find it denied and you then need to decide whether it is worth your while pursuing this - as it is quite likely that you will need to threaten, or indeed take, legal action in order to get what you deserve.

 

[W-on-Sea]

I have done that, successfully, albeit before the conditions were revised, but I think it would still be applicable under the new terms.

The situation was: an apparently unexpected (and not previously announced) shortage of drivers led to the entire Saturday morning's worth of services being cancelled on a line, with RRBs being commissioned instead.

Because of the route (necessarily) taken by the bus, this meant that, even had it run to the type of timetable typically used by scheduled RRBs on the line, I would have arrived at my destination around an hour (maybe 59 minutes for accounting purposes....) later than if the train had been running to schedule.

However, in the event, the driver took completely the wrong route at a remote roundabout, went miles in the wrong direction (to the bemusement of passengers who presumed the direct route may have been flooded or affected by tree fall - apparently not though), ended up in a city maybe 7 or 8 miles off-route, got stuck in traffic jams before getting back to where should have been, meaning that in the event arrival at my destination was precisely two hours late!

I submitted a delay repay claim for 120 mins delay, and also contacted the TOC's customer services department to explain what had happened. While I didn't hear back from them, I did get a full refund paid promptly without having to provide further explanation. (This was with GWR).

I was on my way to a football match (which turned out to be a real cracker, 6-3) so was just as well as I'd left extra time in my schedule!