Driving to next station to avoid delays

I am sure this situation has happened many times before.

I was taking a journey from Welwyn Garden City - Market Rasen.

0640 Welwyn Garden City - Stevenage
0700 Stevenage - Newark Northgate (arrive 0755)
0816 Newark Castle - Market Rasen.

Being a seasoned traveller with GTR - I know never to expect trains to run on a Saturday, so I saw the 0640 was cancelled before leaving the house. That gave me enough time to get to Stevenage to catch the 0700. Am I entitled to claim the parking charge back here or is that my choice? You will notice this isn’t a valid connection at Newark, I know the town and know I can do it much quicker then national rail suggests, as I did on that day. So me driving was really to avoid a 2 hour delay. I purchased a super-off peak ticket as that is the only way I could purchase a ticket for that specific journey.

I have often being hit on “code reds” and “code blacks” with the increase fares in travelling to a different station (namely St Albans) be the delta is never that great to bother claiming. I was just wondering in this situation if is again my choice was to wait for the next train from WGC at 0740, so choosing to drive was not the railways problem.

The journey was Saturday 3rd October.

You can't make a claim for any journey which does not meet minimum connection times.

Unfortunately there isn't any clear entitlement to claim back parking costs (or other consequential costs/losses) as a result of driving to another station to mitigate delays.

Thanks. That’s life but I did think that was the case. In the same way when Welwyn Garden City is closed you can claim anything to get you to / From St Albans

== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: 25 minutes ago ==

AlterEgo said:

You can't make a claim for any journey which does not meet minimum connection times.

Click to expand...

If I was just going to Newark North Gate however the same challenge would exist,

1. I drive to Stevenage and get to my destination ontime
2. I wait 1 hour for next train and claim a 60 minute delay repay. (which had this being a normal saturday would be a 2 hour delay repay)

The only reason this was not compliant was because of engineering work and the Newark - Lincoln LNER leg was not running or replaced by bus.

However I digress and totally agree, if the Great Northern Train had ran and the LNER train was late into Newark Northgate so I couldn’t make the connection. That is on me and I am entitled to nothing but a 2 hour wait for the next train to Market Rasen