Quiet coach on trains

[1questionfromme]

If you deliberately book on to the quiet coach on a train what does this mean to you? I'm trying to work out if I'm naive or stupid as I thought it meant no talking on phones or listening to music etc out loud. I feel as though that's how it always was. More recently that seems to have gone out of the window and people just treat it the same as any other carriage. I'm on a train to Edinburgh from Kings Cross now and there's one person who has been constantly talking loudly on the phone and another with a child playing a beepy game on a tablet.

Your post might be relevant if the OP hadn't specified which service she's on, as it's one with multiple staff. Also not sure why you put 'staff.'

I've been on the East Coast KGX to Edinburgh and seen no staff in the whole time. Indeed, since I got on in Doncaster, my ticket want actually checked until I got off in Edinburgh

I wasn’t a seasoned train passenger until my children went to Uni . I didn’t know that quiet carriages were a thing . Genuinely think this is the case for many.

It's staffed.

Took a man to task over having a Teams meeting in the quiet coach recently. Grinds my gears like nothing else.

IMHO we need to call these people out otherwise it will just get worse!

There are usually about nine other carriages. Can you not do it somewhere else and just leave us in peace?!

Theoretically... doesn't mean you can find them if you need them!

I think it's maybe because it's half a conversation which for some reason is at a higher decibel level than a normal face to face conversation. I don't notice actual conversation, only phone convo as it just always seems to be louder.

It means no phones, no music, TV etc without headphones and talking kept to a low minimum. I have no problem with politely reminding people that they are in a quiet coach, and asking them to keep the noise down. A few genuinely don't know, and the rest are selfish pigs!

I've travelled quite a bit on trains with my children who are still young enough to be difficult to keep properly quite and at the baby/toddler age near enough impossible to keep quiet. So I would avoid the quiet coach like the plague as I find it stressful enough keeping them to an acceptable noise level on a normal coach. I find the booking systems give an option to choose the quiet coach but no option for 'i don't want to be in the quiet coach' so maybe that might be useful. Then of course there are the many times we've got on a train and been unable to sit in our booked seats and just had to sit wherever there was a space. Such as if our train was cancelled and we've had to get a different one, or recently where the train had been rerouted since we'd booked our tickets but the company hadn't thought to contact us and had just cancelled our reservation.
Or the time when two previous trains had been cancelled so we barely got on our train as the platform was completely packed, and the entire aisle was filled with people, standing room only, so absolutely no chance of moving down the train to the carriage with our booked seats.

And a slight derail but thought I'd share one of my particularly fun experiences of train travel with a baby where I got on a ticket on the day for a short journey and the only seat was at a table with three businessmen at laptops. I'm sure they were delighted with me breastfeeding the baby while they tapped away but perhaps they were just happy he'd stopped crying once he was fed...
Obviously I would have sat somewhere else if I'd had the option...

I’m currently on a train (Avanti 4 hour hour journey) in the quiet carriage it’s completely silent total bliss. Id forgotten I’d booked the quiet coach until I went to the buffet car the other carriages are stuffed with yelling kids (arent they meant to be in school?) adults shouting into their phones chatting noisily with their friends watching films etc.
I rarely travel by train so I’m not sure if I’m just lucky or if the OP is unlucky.

Do you really not understand? If you are in a quiet coach, please have manners and leave the coach if you need to answer your phone.

Some people don't seem to know what quiet means anymore.

Can't imagine stepping onto a train without my earbuds....

and I don't like selfish people that know the rules and disregard them because they think they're special.

I wear loops on the train. I regularly travel that route in the quiet coach and I have asked people to use headphones before. They are usually ok about it. The thing that gets me is sniffing and snorting, especially if the person has a cold. Oh my god stop sniffing people! Loops make me calm and stop me wanting to scream on public transport.

I had a train journey recently where a mother came on with multiple children into the quiet carriage. Staff told her it was the quiet carriage so she might want to go elsewhere but she said it would be fine. She spent the whole time shouting at the kids to be quiet. That was the only noise from them! When she took one to the toilet the others were silent.

I struggle with a lot of different sounds around me so I always book the quiet carriage. Most people are respectful but those that aren’t are seriously loud.

I just say quietly and firmly, "This is the quiet carriage". If there's no immediate response I follow up with the deadly, "Please turn off your device or move to another carriage". Never fails. Never had to berate anyone, and wouldn't anyway.

I admit I was a teacher and have The Voice.

Same in France. Except there they don't have quiet coaches so every carriage is quiet. It goes to the other extreme: people with children usually sit in the corridor between proper carriages rather than go into a carriage and make noise. I've been on 6 hour journeys where I've been terrified to eat my sandwich because of the silence all around me. Never actually seen a conductor asking anyone to be quiet, it's just the done thing.

The exception is trains with a large number of foreigners, e.g. the ones that serve airports. They can be very noisy. And it doesn't apply to the RER, metro, buses, trams, or anything else; they just have an almost eerie reverence for trains.

The problem I had on the last journey I made on LNER was that it was so many people. If it's one offender, you can usually give them The Look until they get the message, or you do sometimes have to resort to The Voice (also an ex-teacher here). But when it's half the carriage that are at it, I'm not volunteering to be the carriage monitor and go up and down telling everyone off. I'll just scowl in silence and finish my journey in a bad mood instead.

I was on a train coming back from a friends house. I was next to noisy toddlers which is fine - kids will be kids and it’s lovely they’re having fun but I just wanted a quiet place to sit for the 2 hour journey.

I moved along the carriage and hadn’t noticed the woman near me had a dog on a long leash she was allowing to roam the aisles and seats and bother people . It may as well have not been on a leash. No-one looked very happy about it but she didn’t care.

When it came up and started sniffing me I asked her to get her dog out my seating area which she did but then it came back soon after , by this point I was so fed up and grabbed my luggage and moved to the quiet coach.

Thankfully it was genuinely quiet and I had a lovely journey. But I’d have been annoyed if it wasn’t since I didn’t want to move a third time. I feel for what we pay on trains we should get a bit more of a pleasant experience. That particular journey was a £90 return.

I think we need both quiet carriages where quietness is really enforced and designated coaches for those with dogs so the rest are dog free .

I booked a seat on a quiet coach not long ago. At the next station an Olympic level performance parent and her 5 year old arrived and because it was the quiet coach "WE AREN"T ALLOWED IPADS BECUASE THEY ARE TOO NOISY SO INSTEAD LETS LOOK OUT OF THE WINDOW AND TALK ABOUT WHAT WE CAN SEE....."

OMG that poor bloody kid had to count the number pretty much everything he could see, make the noises of what seemed likem every native UK animal, plus by the end of it we knew all about the lack of a toilet at Grandmas (WTF?), all about People Who Can Help Us, all about their favourite snacks and despite it going on for over an hour nobody said a word to the mum.