Mrs of the Shed has just phoned me from Euston to say her train back to New St in Brum, and the one following, have been cancelled due to signalling failure. The station is full of delayed passengers and there has been no indication of when things might get moving again.
Neither of us use the train and have no experience of such an event. What is the likely outcome? What are Virgin (it's their train she was catching) obliged to do to get her home? What compensation are they liable for with regard to the inconvenience and the possibility that she may have to stay overnight and miss a days work?
Any help or information or advice would be greatly appreciated.

I'm not 100% sure but I'm pretty sure they have to get you home, even if it means paying for a taxi from London to Birmingham.

I don't think you'll have much luck on compensation for missed work, football matches or anything like that.

Would have thought Ts and Cs would be on the website somewhere.

Insist they get her home, but you have no chance with any consequential loss.

She could go to Marylebone, there are 2 trains per hour to Birmingham from there (might be a rush on though). She might have to buy another ticket, but she'll be able to get her money back.

Thanks guys. She has just phone to say that they have crammed them on a standing room only train which will be diverted around the signal failure somewhere near Milton Keynes. Hopefully she won't be more than an hour or two late.

Virgin are getting worse and worse at running their train services. I use the West Coast mainline service quite regularly, and it's now at the point where the guards at the gates are turning passengers with apparently valid 'open' tickets away from trains they haven't got a seat reservation on, because all the seats on that train are already reserved. Which is fine in principle, you might think, because that's the same way plane tickets work, after all. But then why are Virgin selling open tickets just 100 yards away from those gates in the first place (without reservations, which I'm led to believe you can't do at point of purchase) if the ticket they've just sold you isn't going to get you onto that (or possibly any) train?

The in-service "service" is also going so rapidly downhill it might as well be done away with, which again I'd be happy with if (as with Ryanair) you knew you were getting fuck-all, not expecting the service they kind of put in the leaflets. The "shop" that you're required to use from a standard seat seems to be stocked with a selection of about 50 sandwiches and 100 various canned and bottled drinks, for a train with approximately 500 people on it facing a 150-minute journey. On Friday I went for the half-bottle of wine option, and the lady in the shop handed the bottle to me and then turned to serve another customer. When I got her attention again to ask if I could have, you know, maybe a glass to pour it into and drink it out of, she looked at me as if I'd just asked her if she would mind sucking me off.

Still, at least so far I still get on their trains each time, and don't have to bludgeon my way through the queue with a wooden cudgel (which will presumably be the next level of deterioration in service, and they'll sell the cudgels at a special stand on the concuorse). There is nothing, at all, worse than being "stranded" by the "signal failure" excuse Mrs of the Shed is caught up in. (NB I'm sure I recall they were warning about "signalling works" for today, on that New Street line, at Euston on Friday, so something tells me they're not telling the whole truth to people now caught up in any mess at Euston today). Good luck, and hope they get her home.

Well, Virgin are a bit skint and don't get much taxpayers' money to help them out, bless them...

www.tssa.org.uk/article-101.php3?id_article=6086

Do they think Branson is just pocketing the cash or something? If there weren't subsidies then ticket prices would presumably be even more expensive. Do they just expect Branson to subsidise the nation's rail travel out of his own pocket, from money that was mostly made from nothing to do with rail?

eh?

Rogin the Armchair Fan wrote:
There is nothing, at all, worse than being "stranded" by the "signal failure" excuse Mrs of the Shed is caught up in.

Well, I can think of at least one. Like being killed in a train accident through ignoring a signal failure. The whole train system is dependent on signals.

The scare quotes here are your best yet, Rogin.

£262 for a day return.
2 hours 15 mins each way.

You think they're not making money on that?
They need £250m to help keep them afloat?
Why did he take franchise on in the first place if it can't be run at profit without massive subsidies?
Not out of the goodness of his heart that's for sure.

Brian Souter is a twat, too.
If he needs the handouts that badly then he surely couldn't have afford this:

news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/612409.stm

If its a "signal failure" then its not actually Virgin's fault.

£262 for a day return.
2 hours 15 mins each way.

You think they're not making money on that?
They need £250m to help keep them afloat

I doubt they sell many £262 tickets, as people will usually plan a journey like London to Manchester in advance and get a better price.

Of course there are flaws in how the railways are run and priced but cutting public subsidies is hardly going to help. And using language like 'subsidising two billionaires' is ridiculously misleading.

Apart from being spot on, you mean?

I bet alot of those tickets do get sold, my return from Taunton - London is £189 peak and if it's a choice between missing meetings, going up and staying in a hotel the night before or paying the full fare to get in before 10.30am then it's teh £189 for me. And there'll be lots of people like it.

The peak trains aren't usually very empty.

Apart from being spot on, you mean?

They're hardly just giving Branson money, which is what it implies. Their own press release admits it's to pay money to Network Rail, as the fee they have to pay to use the track increased dramatically to pay for £8.6bn of upgrades to the line.

They have an income of around half a billion a year and a ten-year contract. So over the whole life of that contract, the cost of the works won't be covered.

GNER ended up losing their franchise partly because of the prohibitive cost of payments to Network Rail.

Really it's Government circulating money to Government. They'd be better off just giving the money to Network Rail and leaving the middleman out of it.

They could try something mental and crazy like, ooh I dunno, a fully integrated and publicly owned rail system. They have them in other places, I believe.

Well indeed.

Sorry, why should the government pay for the upgrading of the infrastructure for Branson's and Souter's profit-making rail services?