To think that if you haven't booked a seat on a busy train

[MrsSchadenfreude]

You don't stand huffing loudly about young people having no manners and children should be sitting on their parents' laps, and leaning heavily on people who have reserved seats? Train to Cornwall, Bank Holiday weekend, was never going to be empty.

Problems arise when people have reserved seats, but then their trains are completely cancelled due to running late. This happened to me on both the outward and return legs of a journey to London. Of course nobody who has reserved a seat should have to give it up, but lack of a seat reservation is not always down to passenger inaction.

I suffered the reverse of that a few years ago. Travelling New Street to Euston on a Virgin Train, booked a table seat as I had a heap of work to do (and as an academic am not permitted to travel First Class on a day trip).

The train to London before mine was cancelled so there were two lots of people squeezing onto one train. A group of 4 people who worked together were sitting at the table where my seat was. I politely asked the woman in the seat to move please, as I had booked that seat on that train.

And did I get a mouthful of abuse from all 4 of those passengers. I was told that they were sitting there as their train had been cancelled. And that I had no right to ask them to move. I said I would get the train manager, and was called obscene names. It was awful. What was really awful was that the woman herself said very little, but her male dickhead colleague launched abuse at me.

It was awful.

I try to use Virgin trains as little as possible. After that I tended to travel on the Chiltern line to London - cheaper, quieter, free WiFi, although slower.

HollyBuckets when I have been on a train where the previous one was cancelled they have always announced the reservations were cancelled. I don't travel with Virgin so maybe it varies.

To be honest it can be annoying if you have a reservation on either train so I can see why they do it to put everyone on a level playing field.

BoysofMelody it isn't that complicated just if you are getting off at a station with a short platform you need to be in first four carriages for example. It is a busy line with lots of small stations going into a city so busy going in to the city in the morning and busy coming out in the evening but trains are often too long for short platforms at less busy times, I just assumed they don't take carriages off for a few hours.

Some of the trains are local and no seats booked and some have bookable seats.

Because people looking for seat numbers have a very specific way of walking down the carriage, and I always leap up and say "Am I sitting in your seat?" when someone does so. It rarely, if ever, is answered in the positive

But you are not like some of the people I come across. Some cheeky gits settle in and don't look up or pretend to be sleep or type furiously away and hope no one bothers them.

I am not in UK so forgive me. But can someone explain why trains in UK do not operate in the same way as London Bus. Same livery, same standard of service, same fares, same T+Cs etc. but routes operated by different companies.

It must be TFL oversight/rules or something. There should be a similar thing for trains judging by the horror stories here though.

Privatisation wasn't the best thing for trains it seems.

@MarcyMercy no idea why it is the way it is, but just wanted to point out that a lot of people have extremely rose tinted glasses when they refer to the old nationalised British Rail.

Back then, it was being slowly strangled by an even more militant union than today, investment was a compete joke and the time tabling and engineered works were almost fairy stories. I don't remember how comparatively costly or cheap the tickets were, but it was never the rail nirvana some make it out to be!

Hi Shots,

No I wasn't trying to say that nationalised trains were great either, just that if privatised trains ran under a regulator like TFL things might just be more standardised for everyone with the same rules and regs and so on.

But I accept that not being in the country well what do I really know!

Sort of off topic, but what gets me is how so many people seem to find the numbering system on plane and train seats confusing. They look along the top then look at their ticket, then back again at the seat, then walk up a few more seats, look at their ticket, and then sit in the wrong seat!

Reading the rest of this thread has reminded me that I'd forgotten to check whether Virgin ever made the partial refund promised as compensation for the delayed journeys ...

On our way back, and it is still the same, with people sitting in reserved seats and getting arsey when they're asked to move.