Huddersfield to Sheffield during Strike Action

[robbeech]

Buy your ticket sooner rather than later with an itinerary for the service you want to return on. In The unlikely event* that it doesn’t run then you’ll have an extra bit of supporting documentation.

Consider the options. You could excess the return part only at Sheffield which would be only half the difference in fare. So it’s always cheaper to do this even when services are running. However you may wish to ask the guard if they’ll just let you travel that way. An EMT guard allowing you to travel ‘via nottingham’ has given you authority to board the service from Nottingham to Mansfield.

Also consider getting a partial refund from northern and catching the 53 bus which takes about the same time as the Via Worksop route when you factor in a tedious wait at Worksop and costs about £6-7


*no northern trains have run on Saturday since August and nobrelkacwmebt buses since October.

 

[ashworth]

Thank you for all of this useful advice. Having done a little bit more research I think that I may change my plans a little to make my journey home on Saturday go smoother and more interesting.
I am actually going to Leeds but I normally split my ticket at Sheffield as by doing this and travelling via Worksop saves me approx £7 on the through ticket.
Although I also expected a much reduced service between Leeds and Sheffield on strike days I hadn’t realised that there were no Northern services and the only trains are an hourly XC train. I will therefore pay £27 for the through ticket which enables me to travel by a route that may not be quite so busy.

 

[island]

A train company is not in practice obliged to transport ticket holders come hell or high water, arrange taxis halfway across the country, etc. etc.

It may repudiate the contract of travel. It will be liable to refund the price of the ticket (or the pro-rata unused part of the ticket, if applicable). It may be liable to pay damages to the ticket holder, if they can prove they suffered them. But it won’t be subject to an order of specific performance requiring it to complete the contract.

The ticket holder must also mitigate their losses and may be considered to have contributed to their own predicament by, for example, booking train tickets when they knew or should have known there were no trains. The example around buying tickets on Boxing Day being a pertinent one.

All this would have to be worked out in the courts – which may also determine that the contract is frustrated and no damages are due at all.

 

[ForTheLoveOf]

A train company is not in practice obliged to transport ticket holders come hell or high water, arrange taxis halfway across the country, etc. etc.

It may repudiate the contract of travel. It will be liable to refund the price of the ticket (or the pro-rata unused part of the ticket, if applicable). It may be liable to pay damages to the ticket holder, if they can prove they suffered them. But it won’t be subject to an order of specific performance requiring it to complete the contract.

The ticket holder must also mitigate their losses and may be considered to have contributed to their own predicament by, for example, booking train tickets when they knew or should have known there were no trains. The example around buying tickets on Boxing Day being a pertinent one.

All this would have to be worked out in the courts – which may also determine that the contract is frustrated and no damages are due at all.

Perhaps applicable if the company chooses to repudiate the contract of travel, but it gets a lot more complicated considering that all the Train Companies (as defined the NRCoT) are parties to the contract (as per NRCoT 28.2) - so does one individual company even have the right to terminate the contract on behalf of all other companies? And is "there are no trains" sufficient notice that they wish to repudiate the contract? I would say that the answer to at least one of those is no.

What you have said, therefore, is perhaps the base legal situation arising purely from common law, but when you apply it in practice, into a situation where consumer law applies, and in particular where the NRCoT promise that assistance will be provided (perhaps therefore preventing repudiation?), the end outcome is quite different.

There can, of course, be no question that the company would ever be given an order of specific performance, that being a rare beast indeed and certainly inapplicable here - but I could quite foreseeably imagine damages for breach of contract (taxi fare, delay compensation) being awarded.

The matter of not booking trains for Boxing Day is, IMO, completely irrelevant. If the TOC promises that trains are available on Boxing Day, it is not for the passenger to second guess that. Plenty of other means of transport (e.g. flights and buses) operate on that day, so only someone familiar with the railway's typical methods of running (or lack thereof) would know that few trains actually run.

I would certainly not say that this is as hopeless a situation (for the passenger) as your post might be interpreted as implying.

 

[island]

Believe it or not, I think we are saying much the same thing.