Delayed for an hour — then denied a refund

I booked two train tickets via the LNER website for travel on 16 June from London King’s Cross to Scarborough. To keep costs down (£57 total, including a senior railcard discount), the journey involved two changes and three operators: LNER, Northern and TransPennine Express.

- By Jill Insley

The second leg of the journey, the Northern service from Leeds to York, arrived at 4.11pm instead of the scheduled 3.58pm. That delay meant we missed our onward TPE connection to Scarborough, which departed York at 4.10pm, just one minute before we arrived. We were forced to wait an hour for the next train, eventually reaching Scarborough at 6.01pm, more than an hour later than scheduled.

I submitted a delay repay claim to Northern, which was rejected on the basis that the “overall delay was less than 15 minutes”. I discovered that under the National Rail conditions of travel, compensation is based on arrival time at the final destination of a valid through ticket — not just the leg that was delayed.