Claiming "incidental" expenses back from the railway after their scheduling decisions

Just got on a train at Luton Airport Parkway having been stranded there for the best part of 45 minutes (after a journey back from London towards Flitwick) due to Thameslink whooshing two trains in a row, and the third train being delayed.

As a result I've missed school pickup and will now be charged after-school club fees. If the first train (which got me to Parkway) had not been whooshed then I would have had a comfortable 35 minutes leeway (for a 50 minute journey). The second train would still have caused the issue due to its lateness, but was still whooshed.

Delay Repay will give me back approximately £6 (off-peak day return) but I will be charged £10 for the club.

Is it worth the fight with Thameslink over trying to get at least the difference (about £4) back so I at least break even?

(I do understand and appreciate the reason why train companies do this - otherwise the timetable for the whole rest of the day falls apart - and every on-time train you get you have no idea of the only reason it was on-time was because a previous journey was whooshed. However I don't like the idea of an anonymous person arbitrarily deciding, during disruption, that some people will be fine and they can screw others, and the TOC seemingly has no accountability for that)

Good luck. I tried with Thameslink over a car parking charge at Three Bridges station car park when I had to drive there because as per usual the service at my local station was screwed - they said no, no even RTVs

I've had a hotel reimbursed by LNER when they issued a "do not travel".

I couldn't "not travel" as I had just arrived at a UK airport and was booked on a train home, a journey of ~125 miles.

There was no public road transport available either due to the weather conditions.

kkong said:

I've had a hotel reimbursed by LNER when they issued a "do not travel".

I couldn't "not travel" as I had just arrived at a UK airport and was booked on a train home, a journey of ~125 miles.

There was no public road transport available either due to the weather conditions.

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Hotel is a very different situation and is legally required under various legislation and the NRCOT. Consequential loss is unfortunately not covered.

Consequential loss can be claimed for under the rights set out in the Consumer Rights Act. Which? have a pretty good explainer on their site:

When you pay to travel by train or ferry you’re considered to have purchased a service. The Consumer Rights Act provides obligations on those providing the service.

• The provider must perform the service with reasonable care and skill.
• Information which is said or written is binding if you’ve relied on it.
• If the price is not agreed beforehand, the service must be provided for a reasonable price.
• Unless a particular timescale for performing the service is set out or agreed, the service must be carried out in a reasonable time.

Depending on how severe the failing is, you can claim back up to 100% of the price you paid.

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To be able to make a claim you have to show that Thameslink did not operate their service with due care and skill.

It appears that the delays have been caused by a Thameslink train breaking down earlier in the day at Farringdon. So you can certainly make the argument that Thameslink have failed to operate their service with due care and skill because it was one of their trains which broke down. They may say the breakdown was due to the hot weather and outside of their control- apparently several of their 700s are out of action with pantograph issues today.

Expect a fight though. The TOCs' general attitude is that they don't have to cover consequential loss. Depends how much you want to fight for a tenner!

This was yesterday; the cause was emergency services dealing with something at East Croydon (according to the Thameslink and NRE websites).

Would '[un]due care and [lack of] skill' cover the TOC deciding themselves to skip stations, thus deciding who to inconvenience and who not to; rather than just making everyone late (but ultimately those needing the skipped stations wouldn't have been *as* late)?

To be precise:

• Arrived at St Pancras platforms at just before 2pm expecting to get the 1405 Three Bridges to Bedford service
• Saw that the train was delayed until 14:21 (it appears to have made up two minutes en route to STP) and was not calling at St Albans, Harpenden, Leagrave, Harlington or Flitwick)
• Even with the 15-ish minute delay, this would have got me to Flitwick around 15:10 - giving me 20 minutes or so to get to the school (instead of the planned 35 minutes if it was on-time)
• I took this train and alighted at Luton Airport Parkway at 14:47 (11 minutes late), to find the next train - the 14:53 - was due at 15:25.
• That train eventually pulled in at 15:27, and the driver - contrary to the platform screens - announced that it was also skipping Leagrave, Harlington and Flitwick.
• So I alighted that train also
• The next in-sequence train - the 15:22 (the 15:07 was later than this one) - arrived at 15:32 and eventually arrived Flitwick at 15:49

flitwickbeds said:

This was yesterday; the cause was emergency services dealing with something at East Croydon (according to the Thameslink and NRE websites).

Would '[un]due care and [lack of] skill' cover the TOC deciding themselves to skip stations, thus deciding who to inconvenience and who not to; rather than just making everyone late (but ultimately those needing the skipped stations wouldn't have been *as* late)?

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You'd have to find out from the TOC what the reason is but "emergency services dealing with an incident" is often codeword for sadly a fatality or some other serious external incident where the emergency services have primacy. Therefore Thameslink/GTR would argue they couldn't have done anything more although if it was @Tetchytyke says it was a broken down train, you'd have to try and gather more info. "Undue care" would be keeping a train in service that would be unsafe for passengers (if it had a service affecting fault), so again this might be argued away. I fear you could really end up down the rabbit hole here!

And no it wouldn't as they would argue - with some merit - that without making service alterations such as skipping stops - the timetable would be impacted for the remainder of the day and therefore many more thousands would also have been affected. Arguably two trains in a row at the same stop isn't great which is where you might get somewhere, but I doubt it.

flitwickbeds said:

Would '[un]due care and [lack of] skill' cover the TOC deciding themselves to skip stations, thus deciding who to inconvenience and who not to; rather than just making everyone late (but ultimately those needing the skipped stations wouldn't have been *as* late)?

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Recovering the service, so that trains are back in their paths and avoiding delays and cancellations for the rest of the day surely is evidence of carrying out care and skill.

There would potentially be case to be made, if they didn't do that (more common for bus companies to not do this, resulting in several buses bunched up unnecessarily) when they had the opportunity to do so, however it may also rely on the underlying cause to be outside of the rail industry's control.

It would cost you more than £10 in your time to try to recover the lost £10.

When I need to be somewhere as a matter of great importance, I will travel earlier than required, to minimise the risk of a delay, or I will have a "plan B" as a backup.

flitwickbeds said:

This was yesterday; the cause was emergency services dealing with something at East Croydon (according to the Thameslink and NRE websites).

Would '[un]due care and [lack of] skill' cover the TOC deciding themselves to skip stations, thus deciding who to inconvenience and who not to; rather than just making everyone late (but ultimately those needing the skipped stations wouldn't have been *as* late)?

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Hardly see how that is fair. If they didn't take any measures to keep anyone to time then I'm sure you'd be arguing there was no care and skill involved. The test for this has nothing to do with the impact on a claimant or whether a service provided was perfect but rather whether they performed their work to the same standard as any reasonably competent person or business in that profession. Which they did, to be honest. It's entirely in line with how the industry operates.

AlterEgo said:

but rather whether they performed their work to the same standard as any reasonably competent person or business in that profession. Which they did, to be honest.

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In fact if a controller wasn't making service interventions, you'd be concerned about their competence and ability to do the role.

Thanks all.

To play devil's advocate a little more - if I'm expected to allow additional time to complete a journey lest it be disrupted and the trains not run to the timetable, why can I not expect the company to also build in leeway for their units/staff diagrams for the exact same disruption - so that they don't have to skip stations and still can turnaround at the end to form the next on-time service?

As per my edited post above with timings, the original train skipped 5 stations because it was running just 14 minutes late. Given I left 35 minutes (ie 2 additional trains of a 4tph pattern) leeway to complete the journey, why don't they?

Further devil's advocate: I can buy an advance ticket for a specifically-timed train, miss it for some reason (the bus was late, a road closed was en route, car park was full...), and the railway would say I have forfeited that ticket and need to buy a new full-priced one. However, they cause me to miss something which costs me money (deciding to skip stations on a train which is running 14 minutes late even though there should be trains every 15 minutes, then deciding to skip the same stations on the next train) and I have no recourse.

== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: 8 Jul 2026 ==

Horizon22 said:

"emergency services dealing with an incident" is often codeword for sadly a fatality or some other serious external incident where the emergency services have primacy

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In this case, fortunately, lines were reopened within about 15 minutes (based on timings from Thameslink's X account: https://x.com/TLRailUK/status/2074473254304071755

@TLRailUK
⚠️ The emergency services are dealing with an incident at East Croydon.
All lines are currently blocked and trains are at a stand. There will be delays and possible alterations to, from and through this area.
ℹ️ More information to follow...
12:39 · 7 Jul 2026

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flitwickbeds said:

Thanks all.

To play devil's advocate a little more - if I'm expected to allow additional time to complete a journey lest it be disrupted and the trains not run to the timetable, why can I not expect the company to also build in leeway for their units/staff diagrams for the exact same disruption - so that they don't have to skip stations and still can turnaround at the end to form the next on-time service?

As per my edited post above with timings, the original train skipped 5 stations because it was running just 14 minutes late. Given I left 35 minutes (ie 2 additional trains of a 4tph pattern) leeway to complete the journey, why don't they?

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I'm not sure what you have in mind, but this is getting into Speculative Discussion territory. If you have any ideas for how this could work, please create a new thread. Likewise if anyone would like to reply with any such ideas, please create a new thread.

The current timetable will be making the best use of resources and will be designed to be efficient and keep the costs of the railway to reasonable levels. Any proposals to introduce redundancy would have a cost and would need to be discussed in the appropriate forum section.

flitwickbeds said:

Further devil's advocate: I can buy an advance ticket for a specifically-timed train, miss it for some reason (the bus was late, a road closed was en route, car park was full...), and the railway would say I have forfeited that ticket and need to buy a new full-priced one. However, they cause me to miss something which costs me money (deciding to skip stations on a train which is running 14 minutes late even though there should be trains every 15 minutes, then deciding to skip the same stations on the next train) and I have no recourse.

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You do have recourse in the form of Delay Repay, where appropriate. In the UK this is much more generous than any other country I've ever been to.

flitwickbeds said:

To play devil's advocate a little more - if I'm expected to allow additional time to complete a journey lest it be disrupted and the trains not run to the timetable, why can I not expect the company to also build in leeway for their units/staff diagrams for the exact same disruption - so that they don't have to skip stations and still can turnaround at the end to form the next on-time service?

As per my edited post above with timings, the original train skipped 5 stations because it was running just 14 minutes late. Given I left 35 minutes (ie 2 additional trains of a 4tph pattern) leeway to complete the journey, why don't they?

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Well that's a big and complex answer, which I could probably provide you with but a) I'm not a train planner and b) I don't think I'd do it justice right now!

But in a nutshell this is due to the available network capacity and the amount of demand, particularly at peak times. You need to try and squeeze in more trains into the available infrastructure and also trying to take into account loading dwells. This is done by trying to efficiently path and 'flight' trains but also by reducing the "dead time" in train crew and fleet diagrams, particularly at destination. So whereas a train from A-B might then form a service B-A after a 15 minute turnaround during the off-peak, to squeeze in say 2tph, to provide more platform capacity, it is now only 10 minutes. Also because there are more trains running in any given section of track, it is much more likely that delays "ripple" to those behind now running on cautionary (slower) signals and then signallers have to make regulation decisions at key junctions and conflicts ("should I give priority to train A or B and delay the other one?") which causes more knock on impacts.

Yes there are some spare units / crew at key locations but it's also not limitless. And ultimately the railway - as with much public transport - is sometimes inherently unpredictable. You might leave with plenty of leeway and then a bunch of kids might run onto the track in front of you or a tree might fall on the line in front of the train you are on. Sure, mitigations and measures can be put in place to reduce the likelihood of this, but there's still the chance it may happen and sometimes you are unlucky and get caught up on it. And if you live in certain areas, and travel on certain routes and particular times of the day, you will be more "unlucky" than others.

Ultimately to improve this will require some sort of cost, and you will have plenty of threads on these forums about suggestions for improving punctuality and driving up demand with a) building new infrastructure or b) improving the reliability of existing infrastructure. If only it were so easy.

As @yorkie says it might be worth discussing that elsewhere, but train planning, rostering and controlling are all quite complex jobs and you can't please everyone.

That being said, the vast majority of trains run run to time (within 3 minutes at each stop) and you have a less than 1/20 chance of your train being cancelled. Of course this can be improved upon, but it's also not as dreadful as some may think - https://dataportal.orr.gov.uk/statistics/performance/passenger-rail-performance/

Passenger rail performance in the latest quarter (1 January to 31 March 2026) has improved. There have been improvements in both punctuality and reliability compared with the same quarter the previous year. For Time to 3, the percentage of station stops arrived at within three minutes was 86.4%. This was 0.5 percentage points higher (i.e. better) than the same quarter in the previous year. For the Cancellations measure of reliability, 3.2% of services were cancelled in the latest quarter. This was 0.2 percentage points lower (i.e. better) than the same quarter in the previous year.

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== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: 8 Jul 2026 ==

flitwickbeds said:

and I have no recourse.

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Your "recourse" is Delay Repay.

The Tweet from TL on X was at 1239, but you said you arrived at 1400 to get the 1405. Devil’s advocate- the delay would have been known before travel.

Personally if I needed to be somewhere at a critical time I would have been checking train times at least an hour before I plan to travel. This is what I do for my commute home with a connection from TL at London Bridge

LA50041 said:

The Tweet from TL on X was at 1239, but you said you arrived at 1400 to get the 1405. Devil’s advocate- the delay would have been known before travel.

Personally if I needed to be somewhere at a critical time I would have been checking train times at least an hour before I plan to travel. This is what I do for my commute home with a connection from TL at London Bridge

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Copied tweet above shows 12:39, my X shows 1:39. Possibly a timezone thing if you're not logged in (shows GMT to logged-out users, user timezone [BST for me] for logged-in users?). Either way, 15 minutes later they replied on the same tweet to say lines were reopen.

And I only travelled in for a one-hour site visit starting at 12:45!

As mentioned above, you have rights under the Consumer Rights Act.

The railway has in some ways codified what level of compensation they feel should be given, in the form of Delay Repay, the Conditions of Travel, etc. However these don't negate your statutory rights. The difficulty is twofold though:

1. Because the railway has codified this, they're not particularly keen on straying from it. There isn't really a clear formal policy for reclaiming e.g. missed social club meetings.
2. It is woolly territory - today we're considering a £10 after school club, but consider some hypotheticals. If you had dinner at the Shard booked and it was a minimum £100 deposit and you missed your slot; or you were travelling to the airport for a £5,000 holiday and the next available flight would set you back £200; or you missed a job interview which would've given you a £10,000 pay rise; just to give some examples. Where would the cutoff point be at which the railway says yes that's fine we'll compensate you for that, versus saying sorry you're on your own here?

Personally I might say £10 is a cheap and nice gesture, but these days this is taxpayers' money, and it runs the risk that if you have the same thing happen again but the next time around the operator says no dice, you potentially have grounds for a complaint because it's inconsistent application of their compensation policy.

This is in addition to the difficulty mentioned further up about proving their due care and skill/lack thereof, which they did actually appear to demonstrate.

All this to say, I don't want to discourage you from pursuing it, but I wouldn't be surprised if they knocked it back, for a number of arguably justifiable reasons. You could consider domestic travel insurance but you'd need a £0 excess policy to cover such small costs, at which point the policy will likely cost more than it pays out over the term. And even then, it usually has clauses about leaving extra time for journeys etc, like minimum connection times for trains to the airport and whatnot.

Personally, for the sake of £6, I'd call it a day. Your mileage may vary though.

Was a fire just south of East Croydon Station. Fire, BTP and NR were present.

Looked like something happened on the abandoned bridge between the courts. And ended up on the tracks.

flitwickbeds said:

This was yesterday; the cause was emergency services dealing with something at East Croydon (according to the Thameslink and NRE websites).

Would '[un]due care and [lack of] skill' cover the TOC deciding themselves to skip stations

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In that case the root cause of the delay was outside of the railway's control and so you'd struggle to make a claim under the Consumer Rights Act.

Service recovery decisions would generally, in my opinion, trace back to the original root cause of the delay. The only way I see that you'd be able to coherently argue otherwise would be if the service recovery decisions were particularly unreasonable.

Personally, I'd just put six quid down to luck and move on with my day.

Thanks all.

I've accepted and moved on with my life (honest!) but I still feel it is very one-sided and I am still interested in the fundamental questions raised, so will consider starting a new thread in Speculative Discussion for further conversation.

Looking ahead, this sort of thing will be for the Secretary of State for Transport to discuss ‘compensation policy’ for GBR with Cabinet colleagues. All of the spillover from this sort of thing currently falls on The Taxpayer. Whether taxpayers would support such funding (and whether it might be extended to bus and metro passengers, car drivers and so on) is a moot point.

Personally, for a time-critical meet-up like that described I would aim to travel on a train at least an hour before and still have a ‘Plan B’ such as pre-arranging with another local family member or friend to be on standby.

I had a hotel reimbursed by SWR on the day Waterloo went "code black" on 21st July 2025.

Dr Hoo said:

Personally, for a time-critical meet-up like that described I would aim to travel on a train at least an hour before and still have a ‘Plan B’ such as pre-arranging with another local family member or friend to be on standby.

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An hour before, when there's supposed to be 4 trains and hour?

Haywain said:

An hour before, when there's supposed to be 4 trains and hour?

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A person hit by a train, or a passenger on train illness, train, points, signal or track failure can all take an hour to unravel and reset (and more sometimes, but that is less usual). An hours' buffer is quite reasonable, more if the next activity is really crucial (flight to Buenos Aires or Job Interview that you really want etc)

RT4038 said:

A person hit by a train, or a passenger on train illness, train, points, signal or track failure can all take an hour to unravel and reset (and more sometimes, but that is less usual). An hours' buffer is quite reasonable, more if the next activity is really crucial (flight to Buenos Aires or Job Interview that you really want etc)

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Bit like flying International, you have to be there 3 hours before, but many allow 4 hours+ Short haul/Domestic is 2 hours, so Id try to be there at least 3 hrs to allow for things like the M25 !

Tetchytyke said:

Consequential loss can be claimed for under the rights set out in the Consumer Rights Act... To be able to make a claim you have to show that Thameslink did not operate their service with due care and skill.

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This is necessary, but not sufficient.

The case of Hadley v Baxendale sets out the requirements for claiming for a consequential loss. These include that the loss must be "of a kind which the defendant, when he made the contract, ought to have realised was not unlikely to result from the breach … the words 'not unlikely' … denoting a degree of probability considerably less than an even chance but nevertheless not very unusual and easily foreseeable".

The OP's case does not meet the requirement, because GTR was not aware and could not have realised that the late-running of trains would have caused the OP to be late to pick up their child from school and incur a £10 fee. This is sufficient to dispose of the case even without considering whether GTR performed the service with insufficient care and skill.

The £10 cannot be claimed.

yorkie said:

It would cost you more than £10 in your time to try to recover the lost £10.

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This is the more practical answer.

island said:

This is necessary, but not sufficient.

The case of Hadley v Baxendale sets out the requirements for claiming for a consequential loss. These include that the loss must be "of a kind which the defendant, when he made the contract, ought to have realised was not unlikely to result from the breach … the words 'not unlikely' … denoting a degree of probability considerably less than an even chance but nevertheless not very unusual and easily foreseeable".

The OP's case does not meet the requirement, because GTR was not aware and could not have realised that the late-running of trains would have caused the OP to be late to pick up their child from school and incur a £10 fee. This is sufficient to dispose of the case even without considering whether GTR performed the service with insufficient care and skill.

The £10 cannot be claimed.

This is the more practical answer.

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If I understand this correctly, doesn't it work the other way round also? When I made the contract (by purchasing a return ticket) I also had no prior knowledge that the trains would be running late.

Back to devil's advocate, when I form a contract by buying an Advance ticket 6 weeks ahead of time, I have no knowledge that the decision of a utilities company will close the road for pipe maintenance on that day, causing me to be late to the station and miss my specific train, causing me to have to forfeit an otherwise perfectly good ticket to travel.

Wo

flitwickbeds said:

Just got on a train at Luton Airport Parkway having been stranded there for the best part of 45 minutes (after a journey back from London towards Flitwick) due to Thameslink whooshing two trains in a row, and the third train being delayed.

As a result I've missed school pickup and will now be charged after-school club fees. If the first train (which got me to Parkway) had not been whooshed then I would have had a comfortable 35 minutes leeway (for a 50 minute journey). The second train would still have caused the issue due to its lateness, but was still whooshed.

Delay Repay will give me back approximately £6 (off-peak day return) but I will be charged £10 for the club.

Is it worth the fight with Thameslink over trying to get at least the difference (about £4) back so I at least break even?

(I do understand and appreciate the reason why train companies do this - otherwise the timetable for the whole rest of the day falls apart - and every on-time train you get you have no idea of the only reason it was on-time was because a previous journey was whooshed. However I don't like the idea of an anonymous person arbitrarily deciding, during disruption, that some people will be fine and they can screw others, and the TOC seemingly has no accountability for that)

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Worth a try. Northern refunded my car parking charges and mileage when I had to drive to another station to make my connecting train when they cancelled theirs.

flitwickbeds said:

If I understand this correctly, doesn't it work the other way round also? When I made the contract (by purchasing a return ticket) I also had no prior knowledge that the trains would be running late.

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You have a remedy for the train running the requisite number of minutes late in the form of (your choice of one of):

• DelayRepay;
• A claim for compensation at the rates mentioned in the NRCoT;
• A claim for a price reduction or repeat performance of the service under the Consumer Rights Act; or
• A claim for breach of contract at common law.

This is to compensate for the inadequate performance of the service you purchased.

flitwickbeds said:

Back to devil's advocate, when I form a contract by buying an Advance ticket 6 weeks ahead of time, I have no knowledge that the decision of a utilities company will close the road for pipe maintenance on that day, causing me to be late to the station and miss my specific train, causing me to have to forfeit an otherwise perfectly good ticket to travel.

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I am quite unsure what relevance this has to the matter at hand, but suffice it to say you do not have a contract with the utility distribution network which is digging up the road, so any question of a claim in contract falls at the first hurdle.

island said:

The OP's case does not meet the requirement, because GTR was not aware and could not have realised that the late-running of trains would have caused the OP to be late to pick up their child from school and incur a £10 fee. This is sufficient to dispose of the case even without considering whether GTR performed the service with insufficient care and skill.

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Hmm.

That can be said to apply in situations where a supplier isn't aware that time is of the essence and, therefore, couldn't reasonably be expected to know that a short delay to delivery of the contract would cause serious detriment. Most people can normally wait an extra couple of days for a parcel to arrive. It's why you need to tell retailers if time is of the essence. Of course, the longer the delay to fulfilment of a contract the more likely it is that detriment will be caused, and so for prolonged delays the defence of "I didn't know" would start to fall away.

I don't see how the same can be said to apply in this situation. A train operating company, acting reasonably, will know or should know that its passengers have places to be and that there will be consequences arising from any delay to their journey. Something as mundane as a late collection fee from a childcare provider, or a missed appointment fee at the hairdresser or dentist, is well within the realm of a plausible and realistic consequence of a delay. And the longer the delay, the more realistic it is that those who have been delayed will experience those sorts of consequences.

If we take your reductivist view then nobody could ever claim consequential loss for anything. "I didn't know" would trump everything and we may as well just put the Consumer Rights Act in the bin.

Tetchytyke said:

If we take your reductivist view then nobody could ever claim consequential loss for anything.

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I agree, it is a bit more nuanced than that. For example if someone buys a ticket to an airport station it is quite foreseeable that they would be catching a flight and that a long delay might therefore cause significant losses.

Why would we assume that because someone is travelling to a non-airport station that they have no plans afterwards? Now, I'm not saying the OP necessarily has a case here, but it does seem an inconsistent standard.

Tetchytyke said:

"I didn't know" would trump everything and we may as well just put the Consumer Rights Act in the bin.

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The Consumer Rights Act gives the right to a price reduction or repeat performance (the latter generally inapplicable in the context of a train journey). Those rights cannot be limited or excluded.

It also reiterates the right to claim damages, for example for consequential loss, but doesn't create those rights. They already existed before the Consumer Rights Act, and they can be limited in the contract - provided that the limitation isn't deemed an unfair term.