To think train companies should stop being so optimistic about their timings?

[tulippa]

I travel by train about once or twice a month (so not that often). I would say 80% of the trains I try to use are either delayed or cancelled.
I have taken a return journey today with one change each way. Each of the four trains was delayed, with one making me miss my connection. The later connection was also delayed.
I often find return journeys are worse. It's like the ongoing day gives the railway system more opportunity to develop problems.
Why can't the train companies be more realistic and revise their timetables to reflect how long the journeys will actually take? Or am I missing something? Surely that would be better than constantly refunding people for late/cancelled journeys?
Or am I just really unlucky with my trains?

I think it depends where you are in the country and how overloaded the network is. In the south trains are running on the network at close to 100% of capacity. It only takes one small delay to cascade into hundreds of delayed trains.

I'm in the northwest and it seems overloaded too. Could they put in a buffer time for the delays? I'd rather just know in advance it's going to take longer rather than assume it probably will but not know how long by.

Dd missed four hours of work the other day thanks to delays she was supposed to get in at 11am she got in around 4/5 pm

That would mean running less trains. That isn't going to be popular.

But they get cancelled a fair bit anyway? It's like the train companies get your hopes up and then you're left hanging about on a cold platform. I'd rather they were just honest about the service they are capable of providing.

It gets ridiculous sometimes doesn't it?

There's already a fair bit of padding. It doesn't take anything like the timetabled six minutes to go between London Blackfriars and London Bridge for example. Adding more padding would still be a couple of minutes here and there and would just mean on time journeys take longer. Every time. The severely disrupted journeys would still be severely disrupted. At the end of the day you still need to get X number of trains through the system at a given time and that will occasionally (ha!) go wrong.

My commute takes far longer than it did 30 years ago. As @strawberrysquashsays, they have added a load of padding over the years.

The network is so busy now that one incident tends to impact a whole day of service.

The network is so busy now that one incident tends to impact a whole day of service.

And it's often beyond the railway companies' control. I was due to travel out of King's Cross one day during the summer, but nothing was moving because of a fatality on the line in Yorkshire.

Another time, they had to turn the power off on the line through my county because of trespassers. It was evening rush hour and trains were backed up all along the line.

Another time, trains were stopped because a dog was reported on the line. Or people throw things onto the line.

Then there's passenger taken ill on train, lorry hit a bridge, vehicle hit level crossing gates, theft/arson/vandalising of essential infrastructure, train having to be taken out of service because some teenage oiks had set fire to the upholstery (I pulled the alarm myself on that one) bomb scares, actual bombs....