[seabass-labrax]

Isn't that a bit extreme? As a counterpoint, I find it useful to be able to pay for a train journey by tapping my card on an electronic reader - no representative of the company is there or otherwise witnesses me doing so - but I have entered into a contract whereby I am entitled to travel to a distant location. And I do want it to be a contract, because the transport company agrees to get me to my destination somehow even if the trains are cancelled. Perhaps the conditions of carriage may be somehow unsatisfactory to me, but the way in which I enter into the contract is almost entirely unrelated.

[rlpb]

There is well established case law on the contract that forms when you buy something from a store (say with cash). There is a contract, on implied terms . I think what we’re talking about here is entering into a contract (or not) on explicit terms dictated by one party where the other party has not explicitly considered them and barely given the opportunity to do so if at all. I don’t think anybody is denying the ability of contracts coming into existence on implied terms.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

>but I have entered into a contract whereby I am entitled to travel to a distant location. I'm not sure why you drape this in the clothing of "legal contract". If the train fails to take you to your destination, they certainly aren't in breach. It seems really one-sided. Why do they need it to be a contract? Will you come and claw back the fare from them with them having no legal recourse?

[tialaramex]

In the UK, where I live, it's completely usual to treat this as a contractual obligation. If there's a problem which means the train can't take you there, the operating company will do everything reasonable to achieve the offered service, exactly because otherwise they'd be in breach.

Example: there are a series of scheduled trains from London (St Pancras) to Nottingham. One day maintenance works meant the line would partly close overnight and the last train would run very slow. Since tickets were already sold the company intended to get passengers to Nottingham by Taxi, reasoning that few would take this already slow train and so a coach hire or other arrangement weren't cost effective.

Unfortunately an unavoidable incident elsewhere meant instead of a half dozen sleepy passengers arriving at the blocked line and being allocated a few taxis, hundreds of us turned up on that last train. The employee paid to order taxis made a few calls and was told too bad, the company will just have to eat the cost of hundreds of taxi fares, call all the city's taxi firms.

[rootusrootus]

Taxis for a 2+ hour drive? That's wild. In the US when this happens they just charter a bus or three.

[tialaramex]

Not the whole London to Nottingham, just the last maybe 20-30 minutes from where the line was blocked overnight for works. And they obviously do often charter buses, in fact my local train operator was a bus company as well so their buses got used for this type of event because it's just internal accounting. However in the example I gave above that operating company had chosen not to hire a larger vehicle because they anticipated low volume. Six taxis is probably cheaper than a coach. A hundred not so much.

They had bad luck, a different train hit a person (almost certainly a suicide, it is possible to get struck by accident but it's not common) and delayed a large amount of passengers like me who were going to London to get that Nottingham train, people delayed by that incident from their last-but-one train [which ran normally all the way to Nottingham] filled this slow, train that couldn't get all the way instead. A really smart organized team in St Pancras could have realised way too many people are boarding that last train and warned their colleagues, but realistically it was probably already too late to organise a better response even if somehow an incredibly joined-up organisation had reacted to the problem.

[masfuerte]

That's a statutory obligation. It works for the consumer because it's not the rail company that gets to choose the terms.

[tialaramex]

The terms of the contract are required by central government, but it is still a contract.

One of the things your government could and should do for you is stand up to this sort of bullying by those who have more money and power.

[seabass-labrax]

This is my feeling exactly - there's a lot wrong with predatory contracts, but the problem is with the predatory part, not the mere fact they're contracts!