In this situation the responsibility lies with the bus coordinator either on board the bus or at the interchange point to ensure control know that the bus is going to be arriving late , and how long it is anticipated the delay will be . Control can then make a decision and communicate this to station staff or train-crew , given the need to ensure contact is made with the station staff or tc the bus coordinator should be trying to ensure control are aware in good time .
Without this information Control cannot make a decision and station staff or train-crew will send/take the train at booked time . Even if control decide not to hold the service there should be some feedback then so that future rail replacement bus services might be retimed .
I have pressed the company on why events played out as they did, following the previous response in #16. Their response is... quite short:
I can draw from this only that what they mean is that, by company policy, trains are not to be held for rail replacement buses, not even for one minute.
The discussion over compensation remains ongoing.
I have known situations when train-crew have been advised to delay a service to wait for a replacement bus . But the ones I can think of have been when the connecting train is the last one to run that day which is a slightly different scenario.
But just saying not even for one minute , i think in this case and most that I know of it would have been more than one minute . You estimate 2-3 , i would say that is being optimistic , not all passengers are capable or seem to want to make a swift interchange under those circumstances so it could easily be a 5 minute delay even though the RRB arrived at the same time as the train was supposed to depart .
