Help,urgent..train Penzance to Edinburgh

Do you have a PhD?

I came on for a look too.
Great news, so happy for your son.

So glad you found the bag and it’s safe.
I too have a son who is prone to absent mindedness.
When he’s travelling by train I send regular texts reminding him not to leave bags behind. Bit helicopter parent but I am prone to losing stuff so it’s just easier to remind him. If he’s on his way home he usually engages in a text conversation with me, so it’s a just part of the conversation. We enjoy people watching so it’s an entertaining way of passing the time.

I travelled from Cornwall to the Midlands by train recently. During the first leg to Plymouth I was sat opposite a drug dealer, recently released from prison, on his way to sign in with his parole officer. He did several deals on his way to Plymouth. I didn’t chat with him but he wasn’t very discrete while talking on the phone and the carriage was almost empty. It’s fascinating how totally unaware people are of how much information they give away in public.

I see it's too late now, but just in case it's helpful for anyone in future, I thought I'd mention it's worth trying the train operator's social media.

DS left a bag on a Southern Train. The lost property number only went to a series of recordings, no person, and the form on the website for lost property said we should expect to wait a few days for an answer.

We checked in lost property at our destination a couple of hours later, while on our return journey, and the staff at the station suggested we try Twitter.

So, we DMed the Twitter account for Southern and got a really helpful person who enquired which train we had been on. Within 10 minutes they'd established the bag had been found, and where it was - sitting in lost property - luckily, at our original station, so we managed to retrieve it before going home.

It was good old fashioned customer service, communicating with a real human, like you used to get on a phone call - only via Twitter DM.

I have no idea whether other train companies have the same, but certainly worth trying if you're not getting anywhere on the phone. I was impressed!

Be aware that lost property at Edinburgh may charge you to retrieve the bag. When we left our suitcase on the platform, it cost us £20 to get it back from them!

It was nearly Christmas and we went up to Edinburgh with loads of bags. At Kings Cross they were encouraging people to put their large bags in a baggage carriage and giving each of us a ticket for our bag, like a cloak room. It all seemed very well organised. But that was an illusion!

At Edinburgh, they simply dumped all the suitcases in a big pile on the platform. It was at the end of the platform with no cover, and it was dark and raining. It was chaos trying to retrieve the bags!

We got all of our bags - except the suitcase with all the Christmas presents in it 😭😭

We realised within half an hour but lost property wasn't taking calls and it wasn't until we retrieved the suitcase the following morning that we knew Christmas hadn't been ruined!

I thought £20 was bloody cheeky, but I was so relieved we had the presents back I let it go! But I'd never leave my suitcase in a baggage carriage again.

This was some years ago now, I hope they don't still charge.

Oh my goodness! When I wrote my thesis I backed it up 3x each night (and took one copy home in case the uni burnt down) as I couldn't face the thought of having to write it more than once! I'm so impressed she didn't give up.

Blimey is he having to go from Birmingham to Edinburgh to get it!

Or the battlefield!

I told you St Anthony never lets you down 😆
Great outcome, people are kind.

I came on here to check on the progress of this adventure. Good to hear that it's found and being collected .
.

Excellent news!

😆😅

Elderly relative Christmas present. Doesn't do electronic banking ... Writes cheques for everyhing. When found DC banked it via their bank app. Which I told them to do on 25 December. If they'd done that then they wouldn't have had to spend two hrs turning their bedroom upside down, moaning to me and me having to do the prayer. Mother knows best and all that.

A very lovely academic I lectured with back in the day used to tell the most amazing story of how she left her handwritten almost finished PhD thesis on the train from London to Edinburgh in the early 1960s. No hard drive/simple re-printing in those days! She re-wrote it from scratch 😱 Everyone with a PhD (myself included) would almost faint at this point in the storytelling.

Over a year later - well after she had submitted & graduated - someone knocked at her door with the original manuscript. British Railways (as it was then) had spent a year trying to track her down.

I really hope you get the bag & especially the photo back @Hedjwitch🤞🏻

I had a lump in my throat at item
" Wallet with photo of Grandma in".

Oh bless his heart. I hope he gets it back.

Oh, be quiet. It can be left over from childhood. I was brought up Catholic, am an absolute atheist, (have been for a very long time) but may reference a saint/ Catholic saying the odd time in conversation - it's a cultural reference point.

Why are religious folk always determined that others are also secretly religious? So wearing.

left the bag containing all our passports and visas on the train

Passports go in a bag that never gets put down.

Argh hope you get it back. Bloody kids. My son once left his on the Glasgow to Edinburgh train and didn’t twig til we were on the train from Edinburgh to London! Thankfully we got it back when we got back to Glasgow.

I hope you find it ok OP.

I once took the train back out of London from a visa appointment and left the bag containing all our passports and visas on the train. Luckily, I realised when I got to the station carpark and it was a frequent service so I jumped on the next train and followed it to the end of the line, where a cleaner had already retrieved it. That was about a grand's worth of passports and visas, so I was extremely relieved!

I left a bag with my passport in it behind on a train once, only realised once I got on my next train. Luckily it was an end of the line station so the train hadn't immediately moved on so I quickly ran back on it, got my bag, then got back on my train.

I hope you get it back successfully x

"There's no atheists on a sinking ship"

The world definitely needs more people like you. What a lovely person you are.