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28 hours over 12 months.
So 52 weeks, minus 6 weeks for holidays and bank holidays, is 46 weeks, times by 5 days is 230 days.
28 hours times 60 is 1680 minutes, divided by 230 days is 7.3 minutes per day. Two trains per day, one in each direction gives an average delay of 3.7 minutes per train.

Hardly the end of the world.
Either that or they've seriously misquoted how much he thinks he's been delayed.

So 550 journeys and only 26 were more than 10 minutes late. That's under 5%.

3.7 minutes didn't sound right.



So only 183 delays. Dividing this into 1680 minutes gives 9m11s delay for each journey.
If you factor in the 100 minute delay, then the remaining 182 delays cost 1580 mins which resulted in 8m41s delay for each journey.

Still, almost 9 minutes isn't a massive issue IMO. It represents about a third of the journeys, which means that for two-thirds of the time, there was no delay.

EDIT: Oh God, 26 journeys were more than 15m late. If you say 25 journeys were 15m delayed and the 26th one was 100m, that means the remaining 157 delays were 7m35s lond

PS: I'm doing this in between seeing patients so calculations may be a little off.

Ah, but a British train is only late (on paper) if it's more then ten minutes late.

Okay, so taken as an average the delays weren't massive but I think that's kind of missing the point the guy was trying to make.
Greater Anglia services in general have a reputation for being rubbish anyway and if you're commuting in Suffolk you get precisely zero choice so it's not like there's any competition on the line to encourage some level of improvement in the service. Hitting them in the pocket when they cock it up is the only way they'll improve and it would appear that the Small Claims Court agreed in this instance and GA flouted the ruling by failing to pay up on time - how likely is it they'd be accepting of similar treatment of a passenger who didn't pay a fine?

We're too accepting of sh!tty service in this country so good on him for sticking to GA.

Yeah, that's one of the problems isn't it. Watch how quickly things improve if they have to refund passengers for delays of more than 1 minute

The entire network would be bankrupt in a week.

Completely agree the guy did the right thing - if you start penalising poor performance, companies will clean up their act.

I doubt it. They're tied into the trains they use as part of the franchise. If they inherit old unreliable stock, it could take years to get them into shape. Then there's all the issues outside their control. I was delayed 15 minutes a few weeks ago because a yob was threatening the guard. When I asked him about it he said it happened on almost a daily basis.

Part of the Wikipedia entry for East Midlands Trains....

Delays are unavoidable at times - bad weather, broken down trains, people jumping in front of trains etc.

I commute every day with the train to work now and I find 10 minutes is okay, in general. Mostly the trains arrive within 5 minutes of the allotted time at the point of departure, which given the distance they have to travel isn't too bad and they have often pulled back a few minutes by the time we get to the destination.

I've had one train cancelled and another couple were up to 10 minutes late (departure, but only 5 minutes late at the destination). Over here, you get 25% refunded for 60 minutes and 50% for 120 minutes late at the destination.

It's be one way to get them to 'voluntarily' hand back the franchises to state control

Getting trains to run on time seems to be an inconvenience when it comes to making money.

Mind you, I can see some legislation being lobbied for by rail companies to stop people randomly suing them like this.

And then the state would be bankrupt the week after.

Is it 10 minutes on top of the 10 minutes window in which trains are «  not late » ? If I got somewhere consistently 20 min after announced time I’d be annoyed too.