PETER HITCHENS: Why I now rejoice when my trains are late. There’s an unexpected upside

I now rejoice when my trains are late, which is often. You might even have seen me muttering ‘Yes!’ and thrusting a clenched fist into the air as my belated so-called express crawls into Oxford or Paddington stations, more than 15 minutes late.

After nearly 50 years of being towed daily up and down this decrepit piece of track, inefficiently and often slowly, it is a major change in my life.

Why is this? It is very simple. A system called ‘Delay Repay’ means that I can apply for compensation every time my Hitachi ‘high-speed’ train is more than a quarter of an hour behind its timetable.

I am thinking of fitting a small, cheery bell to my home computer, so that I can make it go ‘Kerching!’ as I file each report. So far, the system has paid without quibble over a fiver each time, and, as I own a season ticket so expensive that I am too embarrassed to tell you what it cost, I have already been handed enough cash to pay for several decent bottles of wine.

What an alteration this is. The journey is only 63 miles each way, but there are so many excuses for lateness: Either someone has driven a lorry into a bridge at Slough or Langley. Or there is a ‘signal failure’, which used to mean that Balkan gangsters had stolen the cables.

Or there is a ‘points failure’. Isn’t it amazing that signals and points, invented by the Victorians more than a century ago, should fail so much?

Or we have a ‘track circuit failure’ whatever that is. Or there are ‘trespassers on the line’. I have also experienced ‘cows on the line’ (I did actually see these, so I know it was true).

Or the amazingly frequent decision of the signal box, many miles away, to cause the hugely expensive Japanese-designed machine in which I am travelling, capable in theory of 140mph, to crawl behind some flatulent 1970s rail bus that stops at every station. I am surprised, in retrospect, that I have never had an actual apoplexy.

I have more than once been tempted to leap from the train and walk home, but of course the doors are now locked and there is no way to do this. Anyway, that would probably make me a ‘trespasser on the line’.

Still, the muttered curses, pounding pulses, grinding teeth and furrowed brows of the past are forgotten. I no longer scowl and snarl at the pathetic announcements and useless apologies that bray from the loudspeakers.

What was the use, I would retort to nobody in particular, of an apology with no intention to mend their ways. If I could bank their apologies, I said, I would eventually become rich.

Well, now I can, in effect, bank them, because as the train once again begins to grow late, I smile complacently at the slowly passing countryside and start to calculate how much I might benefit. Now, this does nothing to make the service better. I confidently expect it to get even worse soon. All my friends on the line tell me it is inevitable, given the way the railways are run. But hasn’t the time come, in decrepit Britain, to accept that not much is ever going to get better, and just demand compensation?

Let us extend the ‘Delay Repay’ scheme to all other aspects of life. Held up at the passport queue on the way back from your holiday? If the Home Office had to shell out an instant tenner to everyone who waited more than 20 minutes, a family of four would get £40. Think of it. I promise you that you’d immediately care less. Spend it on a pizza when you eventually get home.

Forced to hang on for an hour to speak to a government official or a bank? Get 50p for every minute above five that you have to wait (which is coincidently Reform’s position, having announced today a £30 rebate for each caller kept on hold by HMRC for longer than 30 minutes).

That degree they encouraged you to get was useless? Get 25 per cent of your loan refunded. I’d personally like some way of stinging film and TV reviewers for telling me some rubbish is ‘riveting’ or ‘unmissable’ when missing it would actually have improved my life, but I can see that might be hard to calculate.

As for political manifestoes, where do we begin? I suspect that if the government had to give each taxpayer £10 back for every illegal migrant who came ashore in a rubber dinghy, His Majesty’s Treasury – by far the most powerful government department – would make a real effort to stop the boats.

Let us extend the ‘Delay Repay’ scheme to all other aspects of life, writes Peter HItchens 

There I will be, three-quarters of the way home, and the train is running 14 minutes late. Rather than urging it on to make up time, I long for a quick cow on the line. And then ‘Kerching!’

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Apply ‘Delay Repay’, to potholes in the road, or to the failure of the police to pursue drug possession, burglary and vandalism, and you might also get a change of heart at your local police HQ.

I think I could also devise a formula that would allow us to get cash back for every BBC outbreak of partiality.

Something also has to be done about all those super-cautious weather forecasts that predict great gouts of rain and flashes of lightning for days and nights which end up being clear and dry.

The problem, of course, is that people – and I might be one of them – could become so fond of all this extra tax-free cash flowing ceaselessly into their bank accounts that they would get complacent about the problems that cause the delays and failures in the first place. They might even start wanting the problems. This has certainly happened to me.

There I will be, three-quarters of the way home, and the train is running 14 minutes late. Rather than urging it on to make up time, I long for a quick cow on the line, or perhaps to be jammed once more behind that ever-present slow-running service, to bring the delay safely past the 15-minute mark. And then ‘Kerching!’

For really long delays, the payments can be even bigger, and thanks to this a friend of mine has been travelling almost free for some months on an especially troubled route. She seems remarkably cheerful about it, considering the hours she has wasted on contemplating the buttercups growing beside the line.

This is the choice that lies before us. Sort out the country, or demand money off because nothing works. I am sorry to say that it is pretty easy to work out which is more likely.