Alex McWhirter has his say on the issues facing rail passengers
Rail has a priceless advantage over other transport modes. It’s one of the few that gives travellers the flexibility to turn up and go. At least that’s the case in the UK and much of Europe.
The main train services that require compulsory booking are France’s TGV along with Thalys and Eurostar. In the UK, there is huge growth in rail travel but the freedom to hop on whenever you like is being threatened by a limited amount of rolling stock that simply cannot cope at busy times.
Virgin Trains is well known for overcrowding on its Pendolinos at certain times of the day, and the situation is made worse by the fare structure. (For example, a flexible off-peak return from Manchester to London with Virgin Trains costs £77.30, while a flexible peak fare costs £308).
A Virgin Trains spokesperson says: “The evening peak hour is like a cliff edge for us. We find the last train at the end of the peak is relatively quiet. But the first off-peak train is very crowded.”
Virgin tells me it had wanted to modify the fares so that there would be less of a step change between peak and off-peak but its request was turned down by the government. Some of Virgin’s problems have been alleviated by running relief services, but East Coast’s Anglo-Scottish routes, particularly in July and August, suffer greatly with reports of passengers having to stand for their entire journey. And unhappy passengers have taken to Twitter to publicise their plight.
Would compulsory booking work in the UK? It’s doubtful. For starters, the rail booking system would need a massive overhaul. Timetables would have to be recast to remove commuter stops on long-distance trains. Even if the station stops in question remained, commuters would have to commit themselves to specific journey times. That would inconvenience the very many people who commute long distances into London every day to avoid the capital’s high property prices.
But the biggest difficulty would be in educating the Great British Public. We turn up at a London terminus, expecting to board the next train, irrespective of whether we’re bound for Edinburgh or Brighton.
Jon Worth, EU affairs expert, travels regularly by train throughout Europe and says he’s totally against compulsory booking. “The problem on the railways is an awful lack of capacity,” he says. “Try to board a peak-hour TGV out of Paris and you’ll find an absurd situation where passengers find it impossible to board the next train.”
How has this come about? It’s because unlike older trains (which allowed operators to increase or decrease the number of carriages), modern, sophisticated train sets have a fixed length. They are also very expensive and with money being tight, train operators buy as few as possible.
It is true that Eurostar, for example, provides a limited number of fold-down vestibule seats for passengers who must travel urgently. But customers who turn up hoping to get away on the next train, pay for the privilege. They must buy a full-fare ticket costing hundreds of pounds, and if then stuck in a vestibule seat, won’t be able to work or eat properly.
Even when passengers do book in advance, there is no guarantee of a seat. Modern reservation displays fitted to individual train seats do fail (a quarter of the trips I take with East Midlands Trains have malfunctioning displays) as Worth discovered one Sunday morning last September when travelling to Copenhagen on Deutsche Bahn’s (DB) ICE train. He tweeted: “Standing room only on the ICE from Hamburg to Copenhagen. All seat res signs not working = chaos.”
On a recent Thalys journey between Brussels and Amsterdam, regular Forum contributor MarcusUK also reported seating problems. He wrote: “Staff appeared unhelpful and rude and the whole train appeared chaotic. Mostly business people, many [passengers] were not sitting in their allocated seats, meaning a domino effect with irate and very unhappy people walking around for up to 30 minutes [waiting] to be allocated a seat.”
Worth believes that two European rail systems have the best solution. “Both DB and OBB [Austrian Federal Railways] have got it just right. Their booking sites warn you which trains have high demand and [when it’s advisable to] reserve.” Perhaps other train companies will consider adopting a similar system.
