NR - additional expenses

[jondoe]

Hi all,

Like most, I've had a substantial amount of disruption to my NR services recently, with daily cancellations - many at short notice.

A few weeks ago, after a few days of arriving at the station to find my service had been cancelled (despite checking before leaving the house) I submitted a claim for fuel and parking costs. I noted my grievance was less about the cancelled services, and more around the lack of communication of said cancellations. This claim was paid out by NR

Roll on to this week, the same has happened. I'm arriving at the station for the first train out as normal, only to find that between me leaving the house and getting to the station, my train has been cancelled. This leaves me with no time to arrange other means of getting to work and therefore I have had to drive, incurring fuel and petrol costs.

I have submitted a further claim (again, not based on the cancellations, as there are many every day, but on the fact that they are cancelling services 5 minutes before they are due to depart) for this week which has been rejected.

My question is, if after my appeal I decide to go ahead to a small claims court, what are my chances of winning this battle? I firmly believe that my actions and expenses are reasonable in the circumstances but also appreciate I'm not an expert at all.

My journey is Macclesfield to Manchester and I usually get the 0617 service out.

Thank you in advance for your advice and guidance

 

[Dr Hoo]

Does Macclesfield have app-based parking by any chance?
Some Hope Valley Northern stations have this (via RingGo).
I will check on Real Time Trains, drive to the station and then check again before buying parking.
So, the other day a train failure at New Mills caught me out - OK when I left home but effectively ‘cancelled’ by the time I was at the station. Didn’t buy tickets, returned later when services restarted and only paid when train was ‘on the doorstep’.

 

[Watershed]

Hi all,

Like most, I've had a substantial amount of disruption to my NR services recently, with daily cancellations - many at short notice.

A few weeks ago, after a few days of arriving at the station to find my service had been cancelled (despite checking before leaving the house) I submitted a claim for fuel and parking costs. I noted my grievance was less about the cancelled services, and more around the lack of communication of said cancellations. This claim was paid out by NR

Roll on to this week, the same has happened. I'm arriving at the station for the first train out as normal, only to find that between me leaving the house and getting to the station, my train has been cancelled. This leaves me with no time to arrange other means of getting to work and therefore I have had to drive, incurring fuel and petrol costs.

I have submitted a further claim (again, not based on the cancellations, as there are many every day, but on the fact that they are cancelling services 5 minutes before they are due to depart) for this week which has been rejected.

My question is, if after my appeal I decide to go ahead to a small claims court, what are my chances of winning this battle? I firmly believe that my actions and expenses are reasonable in the circumstances but also appreciate I'm not an expert at all.

My journey is Macclesfield to Manchester and I usually get the 0617 service out.

Thank you in advance for your advice and guidance

Unfortunately you are unlikely to be able to recover the cost of making your own arrangements when it's "just" one individual cancellation.

Whilst I appreciate you may have little practical alternative, the train company would likely be of the view that there will be later services you could catch, and that you should simply do this and claim delay compensation if sufficiently delayed.

In other words, even if Northern are in principle in breach of contract, and this entitles you to recover your resultant losses (which is not automatically the case), you are still under an obligation to mitigate your damages. And I would imagine that the judge, in any claim you brought, would be likely to accept an argument that you didn't necessarily need to drive.

It may be helpful to use JourneyCheck to set up an alert for when your train is cancelled (or to manually check for cancellations). You could also use Real Time Trains in detailed mode to check whether the inward service forming your 06:17 train to work is running and on time - it looks like it is normally formed by a train running empty from Stoke (you can change the date in the link to look it up on another day).

 

[island]

I agree with Watershed. You face an uphill battle getting anything besides normal DelayRepay.