Passengers' Charter

Our people

Our people are here to help you, at our stations, through our customer experience centre (0800 200 6060) and our passenger assist service (0800 138 5560). They can offer advice on all aspects of your journey, starting with journey planning. Whether you are talking to us face-to-face or on the phone, we are here to provide you with the help you need to make sure your journey is as easy as possible.

Our website and app

Our website and mobile app will help you find journey information and buy tickets online. You can find details on train services, station facilities and ticket office opening times, as well as being able to download timetables, route maps, check train times and buy tickets. You can buy your tickets in advance and store them in the app or download on your phone and even opt to collect from your local station if you prefer.

Customers requiring extra help

Northern is committed to supporting everyone in the communities we serve, including older and disabled people, families with pushchairs and small children and those who need more time to board or alight, to use the railway confidently.
At Northern we are working hard to provide rail services which are accessible to everyone, so that everyone can travel with confidence, safe in the knowledge that extra support is available at each stage of your journey, when needed. Our Accessibility hub provides a practical guide to travelling with Northern, explaining what we do to assist older and disabled customers and the standards of service you can expect.

You can also contact our Assisted Travel team who are available 24/7, seven days a week when trains are running:

Phone: 0800 138 5560 Text Relay: 18001 0800 138 5560

Travelling to the airport

Aligned to the Civil Aviation Authority guidelines, we recommend that you arrive to the airport early enough to drop off your baggage and to give yourself enough time to go through all security.

On your boarding pass, you will see the recommended airport arrival time.

If this information is not listed on your boarding pass, allow enough time to get to the airport 3 hours before an international flight, or 2 hours before a flight in France and Europe.

You can contact us:

• through our website northernrailway.co.uk
• for enquiries, by emailing [email protected]
• for complaints, by emailing [email protected]
• by calling our customer experience centre on 0800 200 6060
• by calling our passenger assistance service on 0800 138 5560
• on X (formerly Twitter) and Facebook @northernassist
• through a member of staff at our stations and on our trains
• by writing to us at Freepost, NORTHERN RAILWAY

We will always keep a record of your comments and suggestions. Each month, we review them and report to our board on new trends and issues. We will also use your comments, issues, and suggestions to improve our service. If you ring our customer experience centre, we aim to answer all calls within 30 seconds, which can vary during busy periods.

Our agents are available 06:00 to 23:00, 7 days a week (excluding Christmas Day), and the team can help with complaints, assistance bookings (if you need help during your journey) and general enquiries. We also offer an emergency service outside of these hours for support and assistance on 0800 138 5560.

National rail enquiries

In addition to Northern customer service, National Rail Enquiries is also there to help. You can get information about all trains from National Rail Enquiries and can print your own timetable for services that you use. Just call them on 03457 48 49 50 or go to nationalrail.co.uk/travel-information/timetables/

If you would like a timetable printed and posted direct to your home, you can email or telephone National Rail Enquiries Customer Relations.

• through their website [email protected]
• by calling, 0800 022 3720 (Open Monday to Friday 09:00 to 17:00 including Bank Holidays).

Join in

This is your rail network - we want your ideas and for you to get involved with what we do. There are several ways you can do this.

• speak to our staff - many of our stations are staffed throughout the day and our team would love to hear from you
• meet the manager - we have regular ‘meet the manager’ events, where you can meet the local management team. We will advertise events beforehand at stations and on our website

Join our volunteers who help us to improve our services

Join our panel of over 10,000 other Northern customers to give us your views and opinions on how we are doing, including plans for new products and services, plus the chance to win high street vouchers in a prize draw. Go to northernrailway.co.uk/customerpanel for more details and to sign up.

We apply appropriate administrative, technical, and organisational security measures to protect your personal data that is under our control from unauthorised access, collection, use, disclosure, copying, modification, or disposal.

Northern is owned by Northern Trains Ltd, a subsidiary of the Department for Transport’s public sector owning group, ‘DOHL.’ All information you provide to us is stored on secure servers. We train our employees regarding our data privacy policies and procedures and permit authorised employees to access personal data on a need-to-know basis, as required for their role.

We also take steps to ensure that any service provider that we engage to process personal data on our behalf takes appropriate technical and organisational measures to safeguard such personal data.

We will make it easier for you to buy the right ticket for your journey by:

• continuously reviewing and updating our app and website for improvements to the customer journey and offers available
• managing stations with ticket offices
• access to over 650 ticket machines at nearly every station

If you think you have got the wrong ticket, please ask any of our staff, who will be happy to check your ticket, or ring our customer experience centre on 0800 200 6060.

National Rail Conditions of Travel

These conditions set out the legal agreement that you enter with us when you buy a rail ticket. Where there are facilities available to buy a ticket you must have a ticket, or other authority to travel, which is valid for the train (or trains) you use.

If you would like to see the National Rail Conditions of Travel you can ask to see a copy at staffed stations, or you can download the details from National Rail Enquiries at nationalrail.co.uk/NRCOT

Travelling without a valid ticket

You must buy your ticket before you board the train. 

If:

• there is no ticket office available
• there is no ticket machine
• the ticket machine is out of order
• the ticket machine is not accessible

you can buy your ticket on board our train from our conductors at no extra cost.

If the ticket machine at the station is card only and you wish to use cash, then you should obtain a Promise to Pay ticket from the machine and pay at the first available opportunity.

If you travel without a valid ticket, we operate a Penalty Fares scheme. Please check online at northernrailway.co.uk/legal/penalty-fares for the most up-to-date information.

If you don’t pay your fare, or any Penalty Fare we may issue to you, watch out – we can prosecute you.

Our full Revenue Protection Policy is available on our website at
northernrailway.co.uk/legal/penalty-fares

Season Tickets

If you make the same journey regularly, a Season Ticket could save you money.

• Annual Season Tickets give you 52 weeks’ travel for the price of 40 weeks
• Flexi Season Tickets offer 8 days of travel in 28 days and will be a minimum of 20% cheaper than an
  equivalent Monthly Season ticket
• Monthly Season Tickets are cheaper than four separate weekly Season Tickets and are valid for
  the full calendar month from the date of purchase
• Weekly Season Tickets are valid for seven days
• Most season tickets can now be purchased online or via the app. Weekly seasons are also available at ticket machines on stations
• Season tickets are available as a barcode within the app for many routes
• Season tickets are also available on Northern Smartcards
• You can also buy Season Tickets for other time frames that suit you better, and they can be purchased online, through our app and from ticket offices at stations.

You will need a photo-card to buy a Paper Season Ticket. Customers using a Northern Smartcard do not require a photo-card. To purchase Season Tickets and to renew these tickets, this can be done online or through our Ticket Vending Machines, as well as via our ticket offices.

Season Ticket refunds

If you no longer need your Season Ticket and want to apply for a refund, you can use the following methods

• Ticket office purchase please either return it to the ticket office you bought it from or return it to our customer experience centre at Freepost Northern Railway.
• If you purchased online onto a Smartcard, you could also request a refund directly through the Northern Website at help.northernrailway.co.uk/s/article/Refund-Requests
• If you’ve purchased on our app, you will need to request your refund through our app.

We’ll issue your refund to you within 28 days. The amount of your refund will be based on the difference between the price you originally paid for the Season Ticket and the cost of buying a Season Ticket for the period up to the date that you returned the ticket to us. So, you might find that you get a smaller refund than you were expecting or perhaps even nothing at all if your Season Ticket was due to expire.
For example, an annual Season Ticket is calculated on the rate for 40 weeks and has no refund validity after 10 months and 12 days. 

Note: Northern apply a £5 refund fee.

Changing your Season Ticket when you move home or change job

If you move home or change your job, you may apply to exchange your Season Ticket for your new journey. Your replacement ticket will have the same expiry date. You can do this if the ticket was valid for at least one month and you have at least seven days remaining on the Season Ticket. You can apply at any of our ticket offices for this a few days before the date of the change. Any extra charge or refund will be based on the price when you bought the original Season Ticket. We do not charge an administration fee.

Lost or stolen Season Tickets

If you lose your Season Ticket or it is stolen, you will need to immediately report this to our customer experience centre. If you think your Season Ticket was stolen, you should also report this to the police. If you can’t get your ticket back and the original was for one month or longer, you can apply for a duplicate Season Ticket, although we may charge you a £5 administration fee for this.

Duplicate Season Tickets

If you lose or mislay your duplicate Season Ticket or it is stolen, we will issue further duplicate Season Tickets on the same basis as your first duplicate Season Ticket. However, we may ask you to attend a meeting with us to explain the circumstances in which your duplicate Season Ticket (or tickets) was lost.

Train companies have agreed a Code of Practice for these meetings, and you can find a copy of this on the National Rail website and train company websites. We will refund the cost of tickets you have to buy while waiting for your duplicate Season Ticket to arrive if you send them to us within 28 days of them being out of date. We will not charge you an administration fee for this.

Note: we do not issue duplicates for weekly Season Tickets.

Damaged or faulty Season Tickets

If your Season Ticket is damaged, cannot be read or won’t work in the ticket gates, we will replace it free of charge at any of our ticket offices.

Forgotten your Season Ticket?

If you do not have your ticket with you when you travel you must buy a ticket for the journey. However, we will refund the ticket the first two times you forget, if you send us the ticket within 28 days of your journey. The second time, we will charge you an administration fee of £5.

Photo-cards for Season Tickets and railcards

Photocards are only required for paper Season Tickets. To get your free photo-card you will need to give us a recent, passport-sized photograph. Each photocard has a unique number, which will also be printed on your Season Ticket. Your paper Season Ticket is not valid without the photo-card. If you lose your photo- card or it is stolen, we can issue you with another one, but you will need another passport-sized photograph for this.

Other modes of transport

You can use Rover and Ranger tickets on the Northern rail network. We also accept certain types of multi- modal tickets including:

• MCard in West Yorkshire
• Travelmaster in South Yorkshire
• System One in Greater Manchester
• Network One in Tyne and Wear
• Nexus POP cards between Sunderland and Newcastle
• Trio, Saveway and Metro Cards on Merseyside

The best way to find out the most up-to-date information about our services is to download our app.

There are also other ways you can find out what’s happening. These include:

• asking our staff at stations or on trains
• customer information screens where available at stations and on trains
• announcements at station and on trains
• help points at stations
• calling our customer experience centre on 0800 200 6060
• Follow us on X (formerly Twitter) or Facebook
• taking a look at our website

Our timetable will be available online, through our app and at each of our staffed stations. It will also be displayed as a poster at every station.

Whenever there is a timetable change, we will publish the new timetable at least four weeks before it starts.

When there are planned engineering works to keep our train service running, Network Rail, the Government owner of the national rail network, must upgrade and maintain tracks, signals, stations, and cables. This is known as planned engineering works, and often means we cannot run our regular timetable. The knock-on effect is that journey times are often longer, or trains are diverted. We try hard to keep you on trains whenever we can, but sometimes we have no option except to use rail replacement buses.

We’ll tell you what is happening we try to do everything we can to avoid them, but sometimes delays or cancellations will happen. We promise that if you are delayed, we will give you as much information as we can about what is happening.

We’ll get you there if you have a valid ticket and you are delayed; we will get you to the destination on your ticket (or a reasonable alternative station). We might not be able to do this by train, which is why we have contracts with bus companies and taxi firms.

In the unlikely event that we cannot get you to your destination, we will provide overnight accommodation.

All our staff have phones – so you will be able to let your family or friends know where you are if you need to.

We’ll compensate you fairly

You can claim Delay Repay if delays or cancellations result in you getting to your destination 15 or more minutes later than scheduled (table below).

Compensation can be paid directly into your bank account by bank transfer and through a credit or debit card refund.

For delays over 30 minutes, we can provide a free ticket across our network, to use when you choose, or we can provide National Rail Vouchers, which you can use to buy any rail ticket.

You can choose the method of payment you prefer when making a claim online or through one of our Delay Repay claims forms available at all staffed stations.

Remember to keep hold of your ticket as evidence of your journey for your claim. If you get off at a station with automatic ticket gates, please just show your ticket to the staff.

If we have published a temporary or emergency timetable for the journey you made, we will compensate you based on that.

If a temporary timetable is needed on a part of the rail network, for example, because of engineering work to maintain or improve the railway, these are normally planned and made available well in advance. Any amended timetables are automatically included in our timetables and updated on our app and website to support you when planning your journey online.

Sometimes emergency timetables may be needed at short notice, for example, due to extreme weather conditions or for emergency repairs. When this happens, we will give warning of an emergency timetable as widely as possible through our website, app, social media, Customer Services teams and at our stations.

If we issue a ‘do not travel’ warning and you follow our advice and do not travel, you can apply for a full refund from the point of purchase if you have a single or return ticket. If you have a Season Ticket and are unable to travel, please contact our customer experience centre who will process compensation covering the cost of the journey.

If you have a combination of tickets for your journey, we will compensate you for your whole journey. The easiest way to make your claim is through our website where you can upload a scan of your ticket or send us a photo of it.

You can also send us your ticket and Delay Repay form by post or email. Forms are available at staffed stations.

For Delay Repay claims, you will need to make your claim within 28 days of the affected journey, and we will make sure that, if your claim is accepted, you will receive your compensation within 20 working days.

Please remember if you are delayed, we’ll tell you what is happening, we’ll get you there and we’ll compensate you fairly.

Poor peak performance

If there is an ongoing period of poor performance at peak travel times (this is sometimes referred to as sustained poor peak performance), we will consider giving Season Ticket holders more compensation than that set out above. When we do this, we will consult Transport Focus.

Delay Repay

For Season Ticket holders, we will use the duration of your season ticket to work out your compensation for a single journey. The calculations are based on the number of journeys you would make going to and from your destination in the working week – 10 a week for weekly Season Tickets, 16 a month for Flexi Seasons, 40 a month for monthly Season Tickets and 464 a year for annual Season Tickets. This means a single journey is calculated at: 1/10 of a weekly ticket, 1/16th of a Flexi Season, 1/40th of a monthly ticket and 1/464th of an annual ticket.

Making it easier to claim

We will make it easy for you to claim. You can get forms at any of our staffed stations or download them from our website here.

If one of our trains is delayed by 15 minutes or more, our on-board staff and station staff will help you with information about the Delay Repay compensation scheme.

We will also make announcements on the delayed train and through station information screens as well as on our website, encouraging you to make a claim.

If you have a weekly paper Season Ticket, please attach it to the form once it has expired. If your Season Ticket is for a month or longer, please photocopy it and attach that to the form instead.

If you have a digital ticket, please follow the online process. A simplified claims process is available for Season Ticket holders who have saved their Ticket details and favourite journeys to their online Delay Repay account

Remember, if you’ve been delayed and you get off at a station with automatic ticket gates, please just show your ticket to the staff and hold on to it so you can make your claim.

Automated Delay Repay

If you buy an Advance Ticket and your journey is delayed, we will automatically compensate you, and you will not have to fill in a form. We can only do this if you have registered your details and bought your ticket through our website or app.

If you decide not to travel

If you decide not to use a ticket you have bought, you can apply for a refund up to 23:59 the day before travel. Your ticket is not refundable from the day it becomes valid unless we have been unable to provide our advertised train service. 

If there are exceptional circumstances that have stopped you from travelling refunds will be made if you apply within 28 days of your ticket no longer being valid. 

We usually charge a £10 administration fee, unless it was our fault that you decided not to travel.

For full ticket and refund conditions, check details on our website or see conditions 29 and 30 of the National Rail Conditions of Travel version 7 valid from 1 April 2026.

Rail replacement services

If part of your journey is scheduled to take place using a rail replacement service and we have advertised this in advance, we will offer you compensation in line with our Delay Repay policy for any delay to the advertised journey time when you are travelling using these services.

Where a rail replacement service is provided without prior advertising, passengers are entitled to receive Delay Repay compensation if you get to your destination 15 or more minutes late compared to the timetabled rail service.

Multi-modal travel

There are five ticketing companies offering multimodal tickets on the Northern rail network. Their websites are listed below:

• MCard in West Yorkshire
• Travelmaster in South Yorkshire
• System One in Greater Manchester
• Network One in Tyne and Wear
• Trio, Saveway and Metro Cards on Merseyside

We are currently not able to offer Delay Repay compensation directly for multi-modal travel as we do not control the terms and conditions of these tickets. Please raise any claims for compensation with your ticket provider.

Your other legal rights

Our Delay Repay scheme does not affect or limit any rights you have as a consumer under, for example, The Consumer Rights Act 2015, to a different level of compensation, including consequential loss, where Northern is at fault. If you believe that it does apply to your journey, please contact our customer experience centre on 0800 200 6060. We always consider each claim made to us on its individual merits. You must not seek to recover the same money twice, for example both under our Delay Repay claims process and The Consumer Rights Act 2015.

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Our commitment to supporting all customers, particularly older and disabled people, to travel with confidence includes offering the following:

• assistance at our stations and our trains, or when making connections
• alternative accessible transport when our stations or trains are inaccessible
• clear, consistent, and up-to-date customer information

Customers can book assistance up to 2 hours before travel.

Our Accessible Travel Policy sets out our policies and approach towards providing assistance for older and disabled customers, and those who simply need some support to make their journey.

Our customer leaflet, ‘Making Rail Accessible’ provides a practical guide, explaining what we do to assist older and disabled customers who travel with us and the standards of service that can be expected. It is available at all staffed stations which we serve.

If you can arrange your travel in advance, we participate in an assistance booking system called Passenger Assist. This is a rail industry-wide system used to book assistance at stations for passengers during their journey and to reserve seats and wheelchair spaces on trains where reservations are available. We will provide assistance when booked through Passenger Assist at any station during the hours that trains are scheduled to serve that station.

We can book assistance for your whole rail journey, even where part of the journey is with other train operators or where our services call at stations not managed by us. When booking assistance, our Assisted Travel team check the station accessibility information, which is also available to view on the National Rail Enquiries website, to consider your individual requirements and to ensure there is enough time to make any connections in your journey.

To book assistance, please contact our Assisted Travel team, who are available 24/7, seven days a week when trains are running. If you're unable to book assistance, our conductors on our trains we will do their best to provide the help you need.

Phone: 0800 138 5560
Email: [email protected] 
Online: northernrailway.co.uk/assistedtravel

Mobility Scooters

We know how important mobility scooters are for some of our customers, so we are happy to accommodate folding and Class 2 mobility scooters on board the majority of trains on mobility scooter-friendly routes and stations as part of a scheme.

We have ‘mobility scooter-friendly’ stations for journeys on 28 specified routes and over 160 stations. For full details, please see our Mobility Scooter Policy on our website: northernrailway.co.uk/mobilityscooter, pick up a leaflet from a staffed station or contact our Customer Experience Centre.

Taking your bicycle

We welcome you and your bicycle to our services. Bikes are carried free of charge at any time, and you don't need to make reservations. The cycle space on trains is clearly marked, both internally and externally. Space is allocated on a first-come, first-served basis.

Currently, we can only carry a maximum of two bikes per train, and this is being reviewed to explore how we can increase our bicycle storage capacity.

For more information on cycling, including hints & tips plus and information on our Cycle Parking facilities, visit northernrailway.co.uk/cycling
 

Keeping you safe

We have introduced Travel Safe Officers on our routes and may introduce more if necessary. They will be on- board trains and will particularly target late-night services. Some of our services already have CCTV onboard, and we will be adding to these.

Welcome to WiFi

The majority of our services now have Wi-Fi onboard, which can be accessed free of charge.

Train crowding information

We are working hard to introduce a new system that enables us to inform you of how busy our services are, through our website, helping you to make an informed travel choice on the time you choose to travel. To find out more information, please go to northernrailway.co.uk/stations

Smoking

Smoking is not allowed in any part of any station or train, including open platforms, toilets and immediately outside station entrances and exits. This includes e-cigarettes.

Cleaning

We have a programme of cleaning at our stations and on our trains. All of our stations and trains are cleaned regularly − many every day. We measure our standards and report to the Department for Transport and Rail North Partnership.

We also publish our progress in our Customer Report and make the statistics available on our website.

Lost property

If you lose something on-board or at one of our stations, we will do our best to return it to you. Please let a member of staff or our customer experience centre know as soon as possible. We will:

•  try to contact the owner if they can be identified
• give a receipt to the person who handed the item in, if they ask for it, or
• keep the item for three months, unless it is perishable (for example, food)

We really hope you will not have any reason to complain when you are travelling with us. However, if you do, please speak to someone on the train or the station and they will try to sort out the problem right there.

If you would rather, you can ring our customer experience centre on 0800 200 6060 or email us at [email protected]

Our full complaints handling procedure is available on the website, from staffed stations or from the customer experience centre.

We report on our complaint statistics in our Customer Report. You can always find out how we are doing by checking our website for the latest copy of the report.

We will acknowledge all comments and feedback within two working days and aim to provide a full answer within 20 working days. If your complaint is complicated and we are not able to provide a full answer within this time, we will let you know when we expect to be able to update you. We take your comments seriously, so when you make a comment or a complaint, we will investigate it thoroughly and give you an explanation, regardless of whether we, our contractors, our suppliers or even another train operator was responsible.

The Rail Ombudsman

Please allow us to try to resolve your complaint. If you’re unhappy with the response you receive, you have the right to appeal to the Rail Ombudsman.

The Rail Ombudsman is there to help resolve disputes between us and our passengers. It’s free to use their services and they are independent of the rail industry. They don’t take sides, but just look at the evidence available. They will help us both to try to reach an agreement, but if this doesn’t happen, they will make a decision based on the evidence they’ve received.

If you agree with their decision, then we must act on what they say. You can appeal to the Rail Ombudsman if:

• you’re unhappy with our final response to your complaint which will be contained in a letter or email (sometimes called a ‘deadlock letter’); or
• we haven’t resolved your complaint within 40 working days of receiving it; and they will independently review your complaint and where appropriate, follow things up on your behalf.

Contact details

Northern

Our website northernrailway.co.uk

App download northernrailway.co.uk/app

Our email [email protected] and [email protected]

Our X feed (formerly Twitter) x.com/northernassist 

Our Facebook account facebook.com/northernassist

Delay Repay applications by post Freepost Northern Railway

Passenger complaints and enquires by post Freepost, Northern Railway

Customer experience centre 0800 200 6060 

Passenger assist service 0800 138 55 60

Rail Ombudsman

Telephone: 0330 094 0362

Textphone: 0330 094 0363

Email: [email protected]

X (formerly known as twitter): @RailOmbudsman 

By Post: FREEPOST – RAIL OMBUDSMAN

The Ombudsman contact centre team is available: Monday to Friday - 09:00 to 17:00

To view our up-to-date step-free access map online, please click here.

To easily print the Passengers' Charter - download this file.