In theory break of journey is prohibited on the outward portion - but given the circumstances, I hardly think the railway is in any position to try and enforce that restriction. So I would say you are fine to start late at Rugby.
That's fairly standard to be honest. Isn't their online sales provided by Trainline?
That it's standard doesn't mean it's a good customer experience!
They perhaps could have taken the tickets in and posted them off for you but that would probably result in taking longer for you to get your refund. To be honest, I'm surprised they want the tickets posted as most online retailers can deal with an image of the cut-up tickets these days.
Whilst forwarding of refund applications to the relevant TOC is covered in Knowledgebase, it explicitly states that requests for tickets purchased through a third party (which includes Telesales and internet sites) should be referred back to the original retailer, presumably as they'll have a different refund process.
Hence the words “perhaps could”, but it is debatable whether a TOCs own website should be considered a third party retailer.
When it's outsourced to a third party I'd say yes.
I'd have to disagree. I bought the tickets from the LNWR website, Picked them up from a machine at an LNWR station, and then tried to get a refund from the ticket office in the same station from a man wearing an LNWR uniform.
If you look closely in the Booking Terms & Conditions, you’ll find the following statement:
The signs that they’ve contracted the online booking site to the Trainline are there if you know where to look - it’s why the ticket purchasing interface looks so similar to that of Northern and CrossCountry, just to name a few.