Railway Pucntuality regulation

[Anonymous]

I'm Korean working for Korean National Railroad in the international cooperation div.

I need help of Railway policy from world railway companies.
We KNR has regulation of passenger refund if the train delays more than 30 minutes.
It is same to High speed rail. We consider train punctuality if the train runs less than 5 minutes to the schedule for statistics purpose.
What about other countries for example Japan, France, Germany, Spain, Itly, Sweden.

Your comments will be very useful to me.

Thanks in advance

G.H Kang

[jeaton]

Mr. Kang,

Amtrak, our longhaul and regional service provider, had a "Satisfaction Guaranteed" program offering refunds for very late trains. I don't think it kicked in unless there was at least a 30 minute delay, but payments were still running over $1 million per year. This program was dropped about two years ago, with the logic that the cash would be better used to apply to maintenance programs that might actually reduce some of the chronic delay problems.

If your go to http://www.amtrak.com/press/performancereports.html you will find a couple of Amtrak's monthly reports and they have a section that gives a breakdown of schedule performance and causes. Most will agree it is pretty dismal, but there is an ongoing effort to improve the situation.

I am not aware of any commuter services that offer refunds, but with better financing and operating conditions, these services have better on-time performance records.