Train delays cost passengers 3.6 million hours last year, research finds
Virgin Trains East Coast has highest proportion of significant delays, according to research by consumer group Which?
![Virgin said 80 per cent of its delay were outside its control](https://static.independent.co.uk/s3fs-public/thumbnails/image/2015/10/02/21/Virgin-Trains.jpg)
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Passengers lost at least 3.6 million hours due to significantly delayed trains in 2016/17, according to new research.
Delays of at least half an hour affected 7.2 million passenger journeys in Britain, consumer group Which? said.
It found Virgin Trains East Coast was the train company with the highest proportion of significant delays, with 3.7 per cent of its services running between 30 minutes and two hours late.
This was followed by Virgin Trains West Coast (2 per cent) and CrossCountry (1.1 per cent).
The best performance was by c2c at just 0.2 per cent, according to the analysis of Office of Rail and Road (ORR) data from April 2016 to March 2017.
The research was released ahead of the 3.4 per cent average fare increase on Tuesday.
A separate poll of 8,200 UK adults by Which? found two in five (40 per cent) commuters claim they were not told of their rights to compensation the last time they were entitled to a payout.
This rose to over half (54 per cent) of leisure passengers.
Which? managing director of public markets Alex Hayman said delays suffered by passengers are "even more infuriating" when they struggle to claim compensation.
He went on: "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."
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 five-fold to £45 million a year."
The ORR said it is expanding its monitoring of delay compensation to better understand the volume of claims for each firm and how quickly they are processed.
A Virgin Trains spokesman said: "Clearly, it's harder to run trains exactly to time over a 400-mile route, and around 80 per cent 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."
Shadow transport secretary Andy McDonald said: "This research shows that private rail companies are failing to provide reliable services and the Government is refusing to hold them to account.
"Our railway is fragmented and the claims system is unnecessarily complex, meaning passengers are missing out on the compensation they are owed.
"The Tories have had years to improve and simplify the compensation process but instead they are defending private train companies, rather than standing up for passengers.
"This is yet more evidence that privatised rail is broken, which is why Labour will take our railway back into public ownership to be run for passengers, not profit."
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