Northern Only ticket - delay repay assumes used TPE?

[yorkie]

IIRC, I asked at the booking office if I could catch the next train as I needed to be in Manchester. Booking office said: "No, you need a new ticket."
In a sense, it was useful having very simple and clear advice (despite it being wrong). For me, being on time was my primary objective.
If I'd asked what my options were, I might have got a more fulsome answer?

I accept this is an absurd situation but the problem is, you asked Virgin, but do we know what the position of Northern/TPE was?

For the booking office to reply with that response without checking, suggests that they were not prepared to ask Northern/TPE. I should find that shocking and staggering. But you know what? It's Virgin Trains. So I'm not surprised in the slightest.

What frustrates me is when people go on and on about so-called 'reforms' the industry apparently needs (in their opinion), now without going into detail here they are often going on about things that do not really need to be reformed, and yet things like this are not even on their radar!

Incidents like this bring the rail industry into disrepute, in my opinion.

I have long said that there needs to be a rule that comes into play that allows customers with TOC specific tickets to take the next available train of any TOC, if the next train operated by the TOC on their ticket exceeds a certain amount of time. In my view that should be 30 minutes.

This is the kind of reform we need, but RDG and the TOCs would never EVER put forward for consideration.