A couple of minutes will normally be regarded as a 'sub-threshold delay' (normally 3 mins is the margin) and so is not recorded as a delay at all for the purposes of Schedule 8.
The rate the LNER conductor quoted seems the right kind of level, given the high revenue nature of the route.
It is interesting to note that some of the comments here recognise that the much of the Sched 8 Delay Attribution machinery is likely to be kept post-GBR. Indeed, a fair amount of it predates privatisation! When senior managers say they wish to 'abolish Sched 8' they are normally of course only thinking about payments, not the measurement machinery behind it...which, although cumbersome, is vital management information for improvement.
NR has always been vocal about 'abolishing Sched 8'. Unfortunately for all of us, their routes often end up having up to pay up to TOCs as performance is, on a long term basis, below the benchmarks set by ORR. So they have always seen it as an unecessary cash outflow from a company that is insufficiently funded. When the regime was created (thinks: do I admit to being around then?) the idea was that the benchmarks should normally be more balanced, ie they could just as easily be exceeded by NR as they are not reached. Somewhere along the line, this got garbled (perhaps because the whole industry's average performance in absolute terms has been very slowly declining for about a decade although there are some signs that it is now flattening out?) And, was always the case, some routes/TOCs do much better on performance improvement than others.
. Are they just taken as an overhead, the cost of doing business, or are they also minutely analysed, salaries, office costs, etc, and then recharged to the delays?
