Dear Sir/Madam
I was unfortunate to be on the 15:03 train from Birmingham to Oxenholme on Friday 25th June.
This is likely to be a long letter, so I’d advise you to go and make yourself a cup of tea, take your shoes off and put your feet up. If you haven’t washed your feet in the last month then you can ignore the last two suggestions.
You may want to read this in installments, otherwise there’s a lot of ground to cover
Installment one – Dude, where’s my coach?
The train from Birmingham to Oxenholme was crowded. I’m not talking about ‘Oh, we’ve got a few more people than we expected’. I’m talking about human sardine time. I’m talking about a packing density that would make any decent compressed matter black hole proud. If we’d had any more people on the train then we’d have gone critical and there would be a nice radioactive hole in the middle of the Midlands countryside, and where would your West Coast Upgrade be then?
The overcrowding was puzzling.
Consider; We’re talking about a Friday. In summer. On a main holiday route. The exams have just (or nearly) finished. Establishing that a few extra coaches would be required would be, I would have thought, a reasonably easy process. I would make a bet that Virgin has the booking system connected up to a computer so they know precisely how many people would be travelling at any one time. My bets are on a sadistic computer program where the algorithm is
Number of coaches = (number people)/(number of people per coach) - (random number between 1 and 5)
I was lucky enough to be overcrowded next to the café, so although the overall business was poor (getting to the place would have been the equivalent of a horizontal climb up Everest) the girl did some business off me. It was actually quite entertaining watching people negotiate bodies and luggage (see installment 3) to get to the toilet (there are some things that have to be done, no matter what the cost). Perhaps if Virgin is to continue using their existing coach computer program they might invest in some ‘in seat’ facilities?
I normally have a sleep on this journey (I do travel Brum to Lakes quite often), but until Virgin installs some kind of ceiling harness or hammock system it looks like I’m going to forgo that pleasure. I’m minded of the old ad ‘Let The Train Take The Strain’. I assume that the only way to achieve this is to suspend myself from the ceiling
Installment two – pick a coach – any coach
You will, of course, be asking ‘Why didn’t the stupid ****** book a seat?’. Well, I did. I booked 2 weeks in advance (with difficulty, I might add – the two week advance tickets were released exactly 14 days before I wanted to travel – someone has a sense of humour). The condition of booking in advance is that you take the train specified and no other. And you get a seat allocated. Oh boy – joy and delight, a guaranteed seat.
Umm
The train arrives in Birminham. It’s one of your nice new trains (not the newest one, which I think is the Pendolino – it was a Voyager – which to me means that it can travel at Warp 9.9 but enough of that). These nice new trains have electronic displays on the door with the destination of the train and the coach number.
Or not
It did indicate where it was going (which was useful). But it didn’t say what number the coaches were (OK, if you’re going to be pedantic, which letter). Now I have to rather shamefacedly admit that I’m not a trainspotter. I have no idea whether you start with ‘A’ at the front or the rear or whether you number the coaches using the same program that allocates stock (‘take a letter, any letter’). And even if I did it was only when the train had stopped and I could get to the nearest door that I discovered that there wasn’t a coach number, and by then it was too late to start counting coaches.
So there I was, clutching a ticket that promised me coach D, seat 18A, and I had to find out where that seat was. I actually managed to get on the correct coach (wrong end though) along with the rest of the sardines. The impossibility of getting me and my rucksack to the seat was very apparent (see installment one). So, I just put myself down where I was. I was subsequently assured that there wasn’t any indication on your fancy new displays as to who had what seat, so establishing the ownership of my seat would have involved a certain amount of discussion.
As an aside, I did eventually fight my way through to my seat later on in the journey (perhaps you could put bars in the roof so we could swing along above people’s heads) and decided that the person in my seat was older than I was and would be better off there.
Installment three – handbags in the overhead storage, anything else on your knees
The designer of this train clearly had the philosophy ‘less is more’. Less seats, less luggage space, less storage. One of the most entertaining aspects is watching people trying to get an average sized bag (the sort that contains a pair of pants and a toothbrush for the weekend) into the overhead storage. Not a hope. The ceiling has a nice artistic curve that ensures that you can basically store your toothbrush and nothing else.
Now, I have to once again point out the bleeding obvious. Virgin provides a long distance service. It’s not one of these piddling little commuter companies, travelling all stations between Upper and Lower Sidewallop. The company does some nice beefy distances. It carries people going on holiday to the coast. Or in this case to the Lake District and Scotland.
It will come as no surprise to the reader of this letter (but will be a complete shock to the planners of the trains) but these travellers have luggage (and not just a toothbrush). They’ve possibly packed enough for at least a weekend. These bits of luggage will not fit in the overhead lockers. Not even the weekend bags. Each person in the coach has at least one such piece of luggage. There are about 56 seats in the coach (I’m sure you’ll correct me). There was enough floor based luggage space for (I reckon) 4 good sized bags per luggage bay and there were three luggage bays in the coach.
It is left as an exercise for the student to work out how much luggage can go in the luggage spaces, but just in case you use the same program that’s used to calculate coach numbers, let me assure you that it’s a lot less.
The surplus luggage goes wherever it can (knees, corridor, table, door). And just in case you’ve forgotten, there were a lot more than 56 people in the coach, and each sardine had luggage.
Now you can see why I advocate ceiling swing bars
In fairness, the Pendolino does have decent overhead lockers, so maybe someone in Virgin got a sledgehammer out and hit the Alstom designer over the head until he or she stopped thinking artistic curves and started thinking luggage volume.
Installment four – ‘This is Malcolm, your friendly train manager’
This installment is not a gripe. It is to award a medal to the most cheerful train manager I’ve ever heard. Malcolm could bring a ray of light to a conference of trainspotters (I’ve nothing against trainspotters but they don’t strike me as the happiest people in the world). Malcolm would cheerfully announce when the train was going to arrive at the next station. He’d cheerfully tell you the route. He’d cheerfully hope that a packed train of sardines ‘had had a pleasant and comfortable journey’
He’s either a comedian or suicidal.
Summary
OK, management summary in bullet points and big letters, so when your manager asks what complaints you’ve had you can tell him/her/it
- Need enough carriages to seat the passengers. If God (or Richard Branson) had intended us to be sardines he would have sold a pint of oil with every seat..
- The reservation system doesn’t work. Pretending you have a booking system one and then abandoning it doesn’t half wind customers up.
- We need more luggage space. Passengers take more than a toothbrush on holiday.
- Your new trains are worse than the old ones. In the things that matter (number of seats, luggage space) they’re smaller and you seem to have less of them. What were you thinking?
I look forward to the day when a visit to the Lake district doesn’t involve imitating an oily fish.
