Great Western Coffee Shop

Just made my first delay repay query and not the best experience.

Not having single sign on from the GWR website seems an oversight. I also booked online through GWR so would have expected to have submitted my booking reference rather than having to fill in all my details again and mess around with uploading ticket photos.

Anyway my claim was rejected on the basis it was only 14 mins late. My argument is that the doors didn't open for another 3 mins after that.

Is it worth appealing (seems a bit stacked against customers if train arrival is different from disembarking) and do I really have to upload and fill in my details all over again? Hitting the 'reveal appeal' button after entering my 'evidence' seemed to take me through the whole process again? It wasn't clear if I'd successfully appealed/was starting a new claim or needed to verify everything?

It strikes me you were delayed by 17 minutes and GWR tell us
with the cause in this case being partly their failure to open the train doors promptly.  So by the own rules you can claim ... though it does NOT say that all claims will be accepted, if we're being really pedantic!

Out of interest, do we know why it took three minutes to release the doors?

We were following the stopping service and at Carmarthan one of the platforms means crossing the track so might have been waiting for it waiting for passenger to clear?

Or we didn't quite get in 14 minutes late? I'm not sure how Network Rail/GWR establishes the times? On computer or someone manually entering the data at some stations?

I'm not hopeful though as I suspect its a case of computer says no.

I wouldn't really mind too much except there were also no seat reservations in first and no sandwiches so late in and then having to find something to eat.

When did you make the journey?

Edited to add:

Looked over last week and can see 2 trains that it could be, 1345 from Paddington on 17th November and 1715 from Paddington on 22nd November.

On RTT the 1345 is showing as arriving 13 late - it actually made up some time from its last stop where it departed 17 late. If it was this one, then you could try appeal on the basis that there was a delay in door release, 3 mins to release doors is unusual unless there was a fault of some sort. https://www.realtimetrains.co.uk/train/C26144/2019-11-17 (link won't last long due to RTT data retention limits)

On RTT the 1715 is showing as arriving 17 late, so you'd have a case: https://www.realtimetrains.co.uk/train/C20200/2019-11-22

If it was before the 17th, it'd need some further research. RTT doesn't go that far back, however there are ways I believe of getting that data still, not something I've had to look at though.

Hi Ollie, Glad to see you're still on the boards.

It was the 14th November.

I know this is going slightly off topic but it is linked. Can someone explain to me how real time trains works, and whether it is considered reliable? I have two instances from the same week a few weeks ago when it seems to me it wasn't (and one of these led to me not submitting a claim for a journey that was over half an hour late).

On the more general point about delay and repay and TOC websites made in the first post on this thread - I quite agree. There is no explanation about how to follow up what is happening with a claim or whether it has actually been received. For instance, I submitted a claim in the summer to Cross Country for a service that eventually arrived two hours late and never received a response, and have no idea whether my claim was actually received or not, or just ignored.

If the train in question was the one from Paddington due into Carmarthen at 21:20 on 14/11, then it was indeed recorded as 14 minutes late arriving into platform 2. There's nothing obvious that got directly in its way, but there was a potentially conflicting movement in the Pembroke Dock train that left platform 2 at 21:22, 12 late. That was well clear before 1B63 even got to Carmarthen Junction, from which it departed 12L at 21:29. But if it really does take 5 minutes to signal a new train into P2 once the station crossover has been cleared, that would be it.

Data further back than RTT are publicly available on Open Train Times, but for some reason actuals for that train are missing. A more complete version is however visible via liverail (http://www.charlwoodhouse.co.uk/rail/liverail). Rather clunky, but that does at least clarify that it (like RTT and OTT) is just a viewer for whatever is to be found on the railway's own data feeds. Both of those sites tell you something about their data sources - in this case TRUST. However, you still need to know what those sources are drawing on within the railway system; for example TRUST data are tagged as "auto" or "manual" - I don't know what exactly that means, but doubt it's what you think.