Rail passengers suffer £150million delays 'rip-off'

Rail passengers are being "ripped off" to the tune of more than £150 million on refunds for delayed trains during the past year, new figures reveal today.

The private train operators received £172 million in recompense for late-running trains from taxpayer-funded Network Rail.

Train operators, however, only paid out to passengers a small fraction of that amount - just £10million - according to statistics obtained by the TSSA transport union under the Freedom of Information (FoI) Act.

National Rail paid the train operators for delays caused by track and signal faults and over-running engineering works for which the company is responsible.

Manuel Cortes, the TSSA leader who obtained the figures, today called on the Commons Transport Committee to mount an immediate inquiry into what he called the "daylight robbery" of both taxpayers and farepayers.

He said: "This amounts to a rigged system whereby the private rail firms get millions from the taxpayer if their trains are five minutes late and the poor passenger only get a full refund if their train is two hours late."

Only eight of the train companies supplied their refund figures to the Department for Transport (DfT.)

It showed that publicly-owned East Coast operator easily topped the refund league refunding passengers a total of £6,616,000 during 2011/12.

The others fell way behind:

CrossCountry £1,022,000;

First Capital Connect (FCC) £637,000;

Southern £522,000;

East Midland Trains £291,000;

London Midland £173,000

Southeastern £148,000;

Greater Anglia £120,000.

Mr Cortes said: "The fact that the publicly run East Coast line is paying out 15 times more than the average for the private operators when it comes to refunds shows that there is something seriously wrong with the current system.

"If the private operators were as open and honest as East Coast, they would have paid out well over £100 million rather than a miserly £10 million."