OnTrack Retail – Delay Repay & Compensation Tools

We launched the first version of Delay Repay in 2016. Built to handle standard journey disruption claims, it soon proved flexible enough to support major, high-profile compensation schemes — including the 2016–17 Southern rail strikes and the 2018 Thameslink timetable collapse. These projects required custom interfaces and logic under tight government oversight, with evolving policy guidance and extremely short delivery timelines.

In 2018/19, we began work on Delay Repay v2: a full redesign and rebuild of both the frontend and key backend components. The goal was to streamline the core claim experience, improve accessibility and user flow, and remove our dependency on the slow public Darwin API. That dependency led to us architecting and building a high-performance in-house replacement using raw feed ingestion with near real-time updates.

This work included re-architecting the backend data ingestion layer to decouple from the slow Darwin API. I proposed and built a custom ingestion and query service using raw Darwin feeds, backed by MongoDB with rate-limited update queues. This reduced request latency from 3–10 seconds to sub-second performance and unblocked the launch timeline.

To ensure resilience and transparency during ingestion, I developed tooling for manual triggers, retry queues, and performance dashboards.

I also supported the government-mandated rollout of Flexi Season Tickets across multiple operators, coordinating updates across five interdependent systems (Booking Engine, Rail SDK, Customer Service UI, Delay Repay, Fare Finder Widget).

Technologies: Next.js, React, Node.js, Express, MongoDB, AWS, Redis, Docker, GitHub Actions