Delay Repay on train pulled from timetable

[TheDavibob]

Hello,

I'm travelling up to Scarborough right now, and the intended train from York (the 1303) has been removed from the timetable as far as I can tell. This will naturally make me an hour late. I'm not particularly fussed by the delay itself, but have two questions:

a) I'm slightly surprised the forum's booking engine didn't email me about the change, it's normally pretty good at this (though my ticket is flexible, which might be it)

b) What's the current status of timetable of the day/delay repay? Is a standard DR claim likely to succeed?

Ammendum: it's showing as cancelled (rather than vanished) on the NRE departure boards, and pulled from RTT - has it been cancelled today or prior to today?

 

[Deerfold]

Hello,

I'm travelling up to Scarborough right now, and the intended train from York (the 1303) has been removed from the timetable as far as I can tell. This will naturally make me an hour late. I'm not particularly fussed by the delay itself, but have two questions:

a) I'm slightly surprised the forum's booking engine didn't email me about the change, it's normally pretty good at this (though my ticket is flexible, which might be it)

b) What's the current status of timetable of the day/delay repay? Is a standard DR claim likely to succeed?

Ammendum: it's showing as cancelled (rather than vanished) on the NRE departure boards, and pulled from RTT - has it been cancelled today or prior to today?

Real Time Trains shows the cancellation as PG, which would have been input before 2200 last night.

Realtime Trains | 1U47 1135 Manchester Piccadilly to Scarborough | 29/09/2023

Real-time train running information for 1U47 1135 departure from Manchester Piccadilly to Scarborough on 29/09/2023. From Realtime Trains, an independent source of train running info for Great Britain.

www.realtimetrains.co.uk

1U47 1135 Manchester Piccadilly to Scarborough
Departing today
operated by
Transpennine Express
This service is cancelled.
This service was cancelled due to a planned cancellation by the train operator (PG).
[/qiote]

 

[Watershed]

This train has been "P-coded", i.e. TPE cancelled the train the night before, pretending that the train was never intended to run. They do this for trains which they're unable to resource due to their chronic traincrew shortage. This filtered through to industry data feeds at 18:40 last night (see the date and time that the 'cancellation' record was created here).

a) Retailers are only required to send cancellation emails for trains which are cancelled further ahead, for which they receive specific data from industry feeds (known as Timetable Comparator files). In theory it's possible for retailers to also use other data sources to alert you to cancellations that happen on or near the day, and indeed I believe some retailers already do this.

b) I'd say it's worth submitting a claim. The NRCoT and TPE's Passenger Charter purports to restrict claims to trains that were "planned to run" at 10pm the night before (the so-called "Published Timetable of the Day"); this has been discussed at length in previous threads (you can search on Google for "Published Timetable of the Day" site:railforums.co.uk).

My view, and that of several others with legal expertise, is that any such limitation would consitute an unfair term in a consumer contract and is therefore unenforceable. That is aside from your entitlement to claim a smaller amount of compensation (25%, provided the delay is 60-119 minutes) under the Passenger Rights and Obligations Regulation (PRO), which explicitly states that its rights cannot be limited or waived by conditions of carriage.

There is also every chance that your claim will be approved in the first place, not requiring any of the above arguments to be raised.

 

[TheDavibob]

This train has been "P-coded", i.e. TPE cancelled the train the night before, pretending that the train was never intended to run. They do this for trains which they're unable to resource due to their chronic traincrew shortage. This filtered through to industry data feeds at 18:40 last night (see the date and time that the 'cancellation' record was created here).

a) Retailers are only required to send cancellation emails for trains which are cancelled further ahead, for which they receive specific data from industry feeds (known as Timetable Comparator files). In theory it's possible for retailers to also use other data sources to alert you to cancellations that happen on or near the day, and indeed I believe some retailers already do this.

b) I'd say it's worth submitting a claim. The NRCoT and TPE's Passenger Charter purports to restrict claims to trains that were "planned to run" at 10pm the night before (the so-called "Published Timetable of the Day"); this has been discussed at length in previous threads (you can search on Google for "Published Timetable of the Day" site:railforums.co.uk).

My view, and that of several others with legal expertise, is that any such limitation would consitute an unfair term in a consumer contract and is therefore unenforceable. That is aside from your entitlement to claim a smaller amount of compensation (25%, provided the delay is 60-119 minutes) under the Passenger Rights and Obligations Regulation (PRO), which explicitly states that its rights cannot be limited or waived by conditions of carriage.

There is also every chance that your claim will be approved in the first place, not requiring any of the above arguments to be raised.

Very comprehensive answer, thank you. I'll make the claim as usual and report back if there are any issues.

 

[yorkie]

Hello,

I'm travelling up to Scarborough right now, and the intended train from York (the 1303) has been removed from the timetable as far as I can tell. This will naturally make me an hour late. I'm not particularly fussed by the delay itself, but have two questions:

a) I'm slightly surprised the forum's booking engine didn't email me about the change, it's normally pretty good at this (though my ticket is flexible, which might be it)

My understanding is it's because Rail Delivery Group does not allow us to use a provider who will actually detect all such cancellations and insists that their own service is used instead.

b) What's the current status of timetable of the day/delay repay? Is a standard DR claim likely to succeed?

In my opinion Delay Repay is applicable, but some people take the view that if a train is cancelled prior to 2200 the night before, DR isn't claimable.

Ammendum: it's showing as cancelled (rather than vanished) on the NRE departure boards, and pulled from RTT - has it been cancelled today or prior to today?

I would take a photograph of that in case TPE deny the claim.

 

[Adam Williams]

My understanding is it's because Rail Delivery Group does not allow us to use a provider who will actually detect all such cancellations and insists that their own service is used instead.

It's slightly more nuanced than this...

TCS (timetable comparator service) is for timetable cancellations and Raileasy already implemented notifications using the TCS data as a source; it was one of the first adopters (and also had a solution prior to this).

It's not prohibited to additionally consume Darwin data to also detect very-last-minute cancellations which didn't make it into the TCS service delta. Indeed, as Watershed mentions, some retailers do do exactly this in order to provide passengers with real-time data. The real reason this hasn't been implemented yet is mostly down to resource constraints (larger retailers can staff an entire team to deliver this sort of functionality).

 

[yorkie]

OK I am a bit confused then but we can discuss in due course; I am pretty sure the system used to do this and then it changed to an RDG source and then it stopped detecting such changes, and I thought I was told that the original source could no longer be used, but maybe I misunderstood.

 

[Adam Williams]

There's a contractual obligation for the service change emails to be powered by TCS, yes - correct. But that doesn't stop you sending additional notifications straight to the customer's phone or via a different channel (including different, additional emails) separately to give customers a heads-up.

And yes, I think you're right that this did used to work with the original data source (because said source did ingest Darwin), depending on when the cancellation happened in the day. It probably would've worked in this case - so it's an unfortunate regression.