More than 3 million hours lost due to delays on rails
PASSENGERS lost at least 3.6 million hours due to significantly delayed trains in 2016/17, according to new research.
Delays of at least half an hour affected 7.2 million passenger journeys in Britain, consumer group Which? said.
It found Virgin Trains East Coast was the train company with the highest proportion of significant delays, with 3.7% of its services running between 30 minutes and two hours late.
This was followed by Virgin Trains West Coast (2%) and CrossCountry (1.1%).
The best performance was by c2c at just 0.2%, according to the analysis of Office of Rail and Road (ORR) data from April 2016 to March 2017.
A separate poll of 8,200 UK adults by Which? found two in five (40%) commuters claim they were not told of their rights to compensation the last time they were entitled to a payout.
Which? managing director of public markets Alex Hayman said delays suffered by passengers are “even more infuriating” when they struggle to claim compensation.
He went on: “The progress to date is simply not good enough.”
Paul Plummer, chief executive of the Rail Delivery Group, representing train operators and Network Rail, said: “Rail companies are working together to ensure more people arrive on time but when things go wrong it should be easy to claim any compensation due.
“As part of the industry’s longterm plan to improve, more operators are introducing automatic refunds and, in the last five years, the amount of compensation paid out has increased five-fold to £45 million a year.”
The ORR said it is expanding its monitoring of delay compensation to better understand the volume of claims for each firm and how quickly they are processed.
A Virgin Trains spokesman said: “Clearly, it’s harder to run trains exactly to time over a 400-mile route, and around 80% of delays are outside of our control.
“But we always want to do the best for our passengers which is why we make claiming for delays as easy as possible and introduced industry-leading automatic compensation on our West Coast route.”