Virgin Trains East Coast had highest proportion of significant delays, with 3.7% of services running 30 to 120 minutes late

This article is more than 2 years old

This article is more than 2 years old

Passengers lost at least 3.6m hours due to significantly delayed trains in 2016-17, according to research.



Delays of at least half an hour affected 7.2m passenger journeys in Britain, the consumer group Which? said.

It found Virgin Trains East Coast had the highest proportion of significant delays, with 3.7% of its services running between 30 minutes and two hours late. This was followed by Virgin Trains West Coast (2%) and CrossCountry (1.1%).

The train companies pocket millions in compensation for delays Read more

The best performance was by C2C at 0.2%, according to the analysis of Office of Rail and Road (ORR) data from April 2016 to March 2017. The research was released before the 3.4% average fare increase on Tuesday.

A separate poll of 8,200 UK adults by Which? found 40% of commuters were not told of their rights to compensation the last time they were entitled to a payout. This rose to 54% of leisure passengers.

The managing director of public markets at Which?, Alex Hayman, said the struggle for compensation made delays “even more infuriating”.

“The progress to date is simply not good enough. If train companies can’t simplify unnecessarily complex claims systems for delayed customers, then government must press for automatic compensation to be introduced across the industry so that people can get the money they are owed,” he said.

Paul Plummer, chief executive of the Rail Delivery Group, representing train operators and Network Rail, said: “Rail companies are working together to ensure more people arrive on time but when things go wrong it should be easy to claim any compensation due.

“As part of the industry’s long-term plan to improve, more operators are introducing automatic refunds and, in the last five years, the amount of compensation paid out has increased fivefold to £45m a year.”

The ORR said it was expanding its monitoring of delay compensation to better understand the volume of claims for each firm and how quickly they were processed.

A Virgin Trains spokesman said: “Clearly, it’s harder to run trains exactly to time over a 400-mile route, and around 80% of delays are outside of our control.

“But we always want to do the best for our passengers, which is why we make claiming for delays as easy as possible and introduced industry-leading automatic compensation on our west coast route.”