Thanks. I should have made it clear that I'm interested in cases where somebody has used a ticket along a permitted route that follows the rules published in the Conditions of Carriage and the Routeing Guide.
How does the discerning passenger, or indeed a court determine what is an error in published permitted routes?
. . . .
Is it fraudulent to buy a ticket to Epsom with the intention of stopping short in London, as per the rights given in the Conditions of Carriage?
I suspect the byzantine nature of the ticketing system, coupled with the rights given in the NRCoC would make it very difficult to define an "error" in routing permissions and thus, prove any criminal intent which is based on the exploitation of an error. Which is why I asked if there are any cases which have actually resulted in a successful prosecution.
You ask good questions, but I am sorry that I simply don't know the answer to the first one - there is no dataset which holds that information (other than internal records to a specific company which might go some way towards recording such details).
As for the question of defining "an error", there are a number of legal judgements in Contract Law which introduce concepts such as "ought reasonably to have known" and erroneous terms which do not form part of the Contract itself and that the mistaken party is in no way at fault themselves. It creates a web of interconneted 'rules', but I wouldn't expect that any low value railway fare within a local commuting area is ever going to enter this arena of dispute.
Not taking place on a railway, but a good summary of the position when a unilateral mistake arises can be found in
Chwee Kin Keong v Digilandmall.com Pte Ltd [2005] 1 SLR 502 heard in the Singapore Court of Appeal.
On the question of erroneous terms which do not form part of the contract, my opinion would be that documents such as the 'routing guide' do not form a 'term of the contract'. But in contrast, the data displayed on screen by the software-driven booking engine used to inform the sale of a ticket at the time of that sale does. See
Statoil ASA v Louis Dreyfus Energy Services LP [2008] EWHC 2257 .
As I hinted above, a clearer candidate for "an error" which the passenger would reasonable be expected to realise is a mistake would be among a batch of low cost local fares when one of those fares was an exception by allowing travel of an additional few hundred miles. But we shouldn't expect an argument along these lines from the use of the low value fares for local journeys which we are discussing here.
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I should have given you a slightly better answer this morning to this specific question:
How does the discerning passenger, or indeed a court determine what is an error in published permitted routes? There is no "set fare" for any journey . . .
I guess the passenger facing this question should try to put themselves in the place of a Court facing the same question, so it becomes the same question. That would probably be best answerd by reference to
Chwee Kin Keong (above), which can be summarised as : where one party (in this scenario, that's the passenger) has an understanding which corresponds with some external facts and actions (an intinery and then travel), and while doing so was aware that the other party (a Railway Company) was confounded by the mistake, and the passenger failed to draw the Company's attention to the mistake. The passenger will be assumed to know of the Company's mistake where a reasonable person in that passenger's place would have been so aware.
That definition brings us back to the popular phrase that if a deal looks too good to be true then it probably is. The Court ruled that 'ought reasonably have known' would be an element of the passenger's deduction in which they reached a conclusion about the price, and that their conclusion was that it "is so absurdly low in relation to its known market value, it stands to reason that a reasonable man would harbour a real suspicion that the price may not be correct or that there may be some troubling underlying basis for such pricing".
That is the line of reasoning which brought me to suggest that if a local ticket was priced similarly to many other nearby local journeys, but was unlike the others by allowing travel through a place a few hundred miles away, then "a reasonable man" might be expected to "harbour a suspicion that the price may not be correct or . . . etc.".
In my opinion, if this question was ever to be tested in a Court, then it would not be by reference to arcane and specialised industry documents such as the routing guide or lists of easements, but would be by reference to the sort of analysis I've outlined above and can be formulated thus:
- Was the Company genuinely unaware of the mistake?
- Would the Company not have entered into the Contract if they had been aware?
- Might the Company reasonably have been aware of the error?
- Would "a reasonable man" suspect that the price was a mistake?
- Is the Company not otherwise at fault?
It's my understanding that the Company is aware of these tickets (thanks to passengers brandishing printed itineries or other challenges that lead to the transaction being escalated to their Fares Mangers within the Company), and it has not withdrawn them from sale; therefore the argument should not have to be rehearsed any further.
