Great Western Coffee Shop

Hello all! :)

I'm Chris and as the name may suggest I'm based in Bristol and travel a lot from Temple Meads (I spent a surprisingly long time choosing my name, trying not to trample over CfN's title!!). I used to commute on the train, but now living and working here and still use the train fairly regularly. I have actually been checking and reading content on this site for quite some time now, and finally decided to take the plunge and sign up as I felt I finally had a good introduction post and wanted to try and contribute to something I'm pretty interested in! :)

Thank you for approving me as a member, and I must say this forum is a very useful source of information for trains and what is going on, and it's also very interesting to see how things work, what happens etc. from an insider's perspective too. It was thanks to a post in this forum I discovered Real Time Trains and have been using that site whenever I catch a train or meet someone else off a train since stumbling across it!

Now for my (hopefully) interesting conundrum...

I travelled by train from London to Bristol on the 12th April - the last day of the Reading blockade - and thanks to Real Time Trains and seeing posts on here, noticed that my journey would be a pretty unique one - using the Acton-Northolt line, going all the way up to Banbury, then reversing back down to Oxford to proceed to Swindon.

Since it was just over 3 hours I thought I'd see if I could make the most of it, and managed to get a first class advance ticket around 3-4 days before for ^21.10 (16-25 railcard fare) and I'm glad I did - certainly got my money's worth even at the bargain it was already! (I must say I am a fan of the new GWR branding and refit too - but that's another topic!)

Here is the link to RTT showing the train I was on - http://www.realtimetrains.co.uk/train/V85377/2015/04/12/advanced - thanks to signalling problems at Princes Risborough we were held at Paddington for nearly 50 minutes and lost some more time along the way - so to finally get to the question...

I read on the FGW website that they will refund the price of the single ticket for delays of an hour or more on HST services. My train arrived in Bristol 50 minutes late in the end, but was at worst 63 minutes behind around Banbury and Oxford (I remember the TM announcing we were an hour behind at Oxford too). Now, can I claim compensation on this journey? Because I was, at some point, delayed by an hour - and had my journey finished in Oxford, the hour mark had clearly been passed. However, am I not eligible because my end-to-end journey was only delayed by 50 minutes? And if not, is it fair that someone who may have been on the same train as me who finished their journey in Oxford could claim, but then I couldn't?

I hope I've put this in the right place considering it's a hello but also about my rights etc! Thank you for taking the time to read and for having me on here and I look forward to hearing what your thoughts are! :)

Welcome to the forum BRIChris and good you felt now was a good time to sign up and post.

Meanwhile I know there are people on here that can answer your question(s) much better than I can do so I will leave that up to them  :)

Welcome to the forum BRIChris!  ;D

Sadly, you will not be eligible for compensation. It's your journey as a whole that is considered. That is from origin to destination as printed on the ticket. FGW only compensate on Inter City services for delays of 60 minutes and over. You could try for goodwill (I once received compensation for a 59 minute delay) but there are no guarantees.

The fairness is subjective. In your case passengers to Oxford would be eligible. It's equally possible the delay at Oxford could have been under 60 minutes and got worse later. Is it then fair that Oxford pax aren't eligible? It's the delay to your journey that is considered and there has to be a cut off point. It will always be arbitrary as to who it affects, whether its 1 minute, 30 minutes, 60 minutes...

Now, if FGW did 'Delay Repay' you'd be eligible after 30 minutes. But they don't and it doesn't appear that the new direct franchise award from September is to include it. That despite the DfT once saying that all franchise renewals would move charter compensation to 'Delay Repay'.

A very warm welcome to the Coffee Shop forum from me, too, BRIChris - and many thanks for your consideration!

Chris from Nailsea   ;) :D ;D

Chris from Bristol would have caused some headaches, so good call on the name, BRIChris.  ;D

Hi all,

Thank you for your welcomes and replies! :)

Thanks bignosemac for your detailed response! :) It's a shame they aren't doing delay repay now, but by the sounds of it from September everything will get a lot easier!


I see what you mean - it could have been the other way around and would have worked out better for me and not someone else... like you say, I guess there has to be a cut off somewhere!

Thanks again!

Should clarify. When the new franchise starts in September every indication is that FGW's compensation arrangements will remain as now. They WON'T be moving to the more generous Delay Repay scheme.

That will also have been part of the formal agreement between First Great Western and the Department for Transport.  Available under a 'Freedom of Information' request?  :-X

It may be worth a try, but they may say the franchise agreement was commercial in confidence.  Have they ever made others available in this way?

Exact memories fade ... but I do recall making an FOI request in the late summer / early autumn of 2005 in my very early days of seeking an ongoing appropriate train service on the TransWilts, and being astonished to receive several kgs of paperwork in the post.   In hindsight, I was 'lucky' - I suspect I provided a route which was opportunistically used to get SLC / franchise stuff into the public domain.

I've felt since that point, though, that FOI requests tend to inform the requester after the event / when it's too late to fix something (and that was certainly the case for the TransWilts service from December 2006, and they also tend to strain the relationship between the requester and the body from whom the request is being made; at certain points it might be a step worth taking, but it's a tool that should be used with extreme care and on carefully selected occasions only. 

Franchise agreements are always published on DfT's website a few months after they become current, however any financial details will be redacted.   So the agreement for the direct award won't be online yet, but will be put online in due course - you'll see the ECML current franchise agreement is not there yet, but the newest other franchise, GTR is:

https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/public-register-of-rail-passenger-franchise-agreements

Odd though that the 'public register' is so difficult to find - it isn't linked from the main 'franchising' pages that deals with competitions etc.

But I also think (like Grahame) that using the FOI hammer to crack this nut will be premature.

Paul