In the news

Delay-repay is about the only thing connected with the railways that has got better in the last few years. The fact that it's viable to create and run an automated repayment system suggests the demand is pretty high.

I meant on deciding who is responsible!

What’s going on in France ???

Delay Repay could easily become the UK's equivalent of The Great Hargeisa Goat Bubble

bbc covering it well

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cdxz934p56qo

I understood the words you used. My question was why is so much time and money spent on deciding who is responsible for each delay. Is it to work out who is liable for the refund to the customer?

If a Northern train blocks the line delaying all services why should another operator stump the bill...

If signal fails delaying all services why should any operator foot the bill...

If a truck stalls on a level crossing halting all services why should the operators foot the bill...

I imagine each operator & possibly network rail will have teams of people tasked with minimising/ defending delay repay through whatever loopholes they can exploit.

the infrastructure manager (IM, ie Network Rail) and Train Operators (TOCs) are incentivised to reduce delays by penalty payments for delay minutes (and in some cases bonus payments for exceeding performance metrics), known as the "performance regime".
As rhb says, to make this work it is necessary to attribute delay to prime cause, so that the right organisation picks up the bill. in the days of commercial train service franchises (these all ended during the pandemic), train operators had a profit motive to be better at analysing and challenging delay causes, to reduce their exposure to delay penalty payments. this did lead to quite a lot of effort going into delay attribution.
the benefit of this is greater understanding of the causes of delays which makes it more likely that something can be done to address the root cause. the downside was it was not efficient at a whole industry level.
it will be interesting to see how the performance regime evolves under GBR, where the P&L is combined between IM and TOC so the commercial incentive to attribute delays goes away.

I imagine each operator & possibly network rail will have teams of people tasked with minimising/ defending delay repay through whatever loopholes they can exploit.

I worked in the York ROC, (Regional Operating Centre) as a Maintenace Controller. NwR have a large team each member having a responsibility to monitor the delays on their section of line. When each delay occurs they then do initial attribution after asking the signalled for information. This delay then gets an initial TI (trust incident) number and a attribution code. Some codes are neutral where the delays are shared between all TOCs, FOCs and NwR like weather, leaf fall, trespass and bridge strikes. If the signaller advises that it had nothing to do with them, then NwR send it out to the TOCs to find out the reason. Internally within the TOC they then try to attribute to a cause. This could be Maintenace (My bit, trouble with the unit), Train Crew (late to train, missing, wheelchair) or operation issues (not sticking to afore mentioned rules of the plan. . Some of these could then be deemed neutral, overcrowding, wheelchairs lighting, defensive driving and get sent back to NwR. The to and fro goes on continuously until attribution gets accepted. The costs to do all the attribution runs in to millions and that is before any payments between the companies.

However, the delay attribution system/calculations are actually entirely separate from the delay-repay system

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cy47dz8yp4vo

mAyBe hE's JuSt aUtIsTic

At the front end, yes. Internally, no.

I don't really understand how it wasn't patently clear to everyone that this prick was a sleazy little pest. It's entirely coded in his on screen persona

Hold an election, one side gets the most votes but can't form a majority so Macron appoints a centrist PM because YOLO, everyone hates that decision and then the first real chance that comes along that whole arrangement collapses because it has zero actual support.

Who could have predicted it would come to this?

This is the thing that blows my mind. My wife and I recognised this guy was a fucking monster from that 'day in the life' piece he did - a piece he wrote edited and chose to put out in the world.

The idea that those around him didn't notice from his everyday behaviour is absurd.

I think that came over as weird to a lot of people but it feels like a stretch to go from what he wrote there to inferring actual criminal activity in the form of sexual harassment.

When a woman tells you that she has been harassed, and the guy is a walking talking personality disorder, maybe look into it.

I'm not saying he's innocent. I'm saying that there are lots of people who could write a day-in-the-life column that's at least that weird and are not guilty of sexual harassment, they're just unusual.

I wouldn't have gone that far at that time but I thought it was clear from the piece that he didn't see the women or children in his life entirely as people.

Fair.

This. He's clearly not wired up properly.

TBF a few of those a day in the life columns are written in jest and obviously not true

I fear more than you reckon are written with a straight face.

You mean wired to the mains whilst stood in a bath full of water?

For a minute, I thought this was the middle aged thread where we're talking about plugging shavers straight into the nearest substation.