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Standing on long rail journeys to be banned under Virgin Trains plan for airline-style fare

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Bletchleyite

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Quite. The idea that local passengers could be barred from West Coast services running on the Coventry-Birmingham-Wolverhampton axis is laughable. They are a critical part of providing the capacity needed to shift the number of passengers there, due to the number of paths they eat up on what is essentially a two-track railway.

Could they perhaps have a Thalys style setup with one or two unreserved coaches for local journeys only?
 
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PeterC

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It wasn't clear but they may have wanted to abolish open returns as well. It might be able to make it work on a service with limited stops such as HS2. To preserve flexibility, it would need to be possible to book your seat as the train pulled in. That assumes you already had a ticket and might rule out dynamic pricing unless you had a minimum cost coupled with a supplement for busier trains. I'm thinking Smart Phone app, not that requiring compulsory use of this for rail passengers would be a problem in itself.
According to an article in the press (I posted a link on an HS2 thread) it is the intention to ban standing on HS2 although I have not seen anything from other sources about this.

I can't see it working without controlled access to platforms. Once people are on board and the train is moving they aren't going to take kindly to being told to get off. Will the train be held for BTP to remove them or will they guard say **** it and ignore them?
 

ic31420

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I don't like this idea at all.

One of the main usp for the railway is the turn up and go nature. Of course that comes with the risk of standing and higher fares. But I accept that. In the last 5 years I've booked one ticket.

What next? Check in two hours before departure time like airports?
 

Bald Rick

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Calm down everyone! Context please!

This is Virgin’s submission to the Williams Review. This is absolutely not a firm proposal that will happen. It is an idea that Virgin are floating, along with slot auctions and the ability to run trains at quiet times. There are lots of other ideas, from lots of other organisations.

For what it’s worth, I think it has some merit for some services at certain times of the day / week, but certainly not all long distance services. It’s not so long ago that some ICWC and XC services (usually those to Scotland on Fridays / Sundays, or Devon / Cornwall at holiday times) required compulsory reservations anyway.
 

Bletchleyite

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According to an article in the press (I posted a link on an HS2 thread) it is the intention to ban standing on HS2 although I have not seen anything from other sources about this.

I can't see it working without controlled access to platforms. Once people are on board and the train is moving they aren't going to take kindly to being told to get off. Will the train be held for BTP to remove them or will they guard say **** it and ignore them?

It will I suspect be more of a case of the only valid tickets being Advances in some form, so if you don't have one timed for that train with a seat reservation you don't have a valid ticket, and so it might be PF time, or at least require the purchase of a new ticket if a seat is available.

SNCF doesn't really do barrier checks, so that's how it'll be there, and much as it has flaws (and isn't the system I would choose) it does seem to work reasonably.
 

Bletchleyite

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For what it’s worth, I think it has some merit for some services at certain times of the day / week, but certainly not all long distance services. It’s not so long ago that some ICWC and XC services (usually those to Scotland on Fridays / Sundays, or Devon / Cornwall at holiday times) required compulsory reservations anyway.

Yes, the "white R" seems to have gone away these days. BR used it as you say at busy times.

My personal take is for a PKP-style system which would involve not marking seat reservations (and so making them available at any time via multiple channels) but having a permanently marked unreserved area.
 

robbeech

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I think a lot of people (not necessary people here) seem to think that over the weekend only THEIR service was busy, caused by flexible ticket holders. The fact is that every service was busy due to flexible ticket holders and the vast majority of flexible ticket holders were only flexible ticket holder because they couldn’t purchase advances for certain trains as they had run out / seats had run out. I would guess that the vast majority of those actually had a specific train in mind rather than really wanting the flexibility. Therefore the issue with this concept lies simply with capacity. There isn’t enough on busy weekends. If passenger were forced to have a seat then thousands of people would have been denied travel on Friday and Monday leaving them stranded. Would we be changing the NRCOT to remove the passengers rights in the case of any TOC not being able to get them to their destination despite lots of trains going that way?

People have recently had to stand for 4 to 5 hours with no access to toilets, buffet or anything else. But these people were on every train. If you told people that instead of the 1500 you have to get the 1900, then the Railway makes £0.00 from that person as they have to pay compensation.

If VT had had a policy of no standing over the last weekend, particularly Friday and Monday, exactly how many extra trains would they have needed to run and in what paths to ensure that everyone who wanted to travel could travel? Would they just stop ticket sales and say sorry you cannot get home to Manchester because there are no seats?

If we effectively remove 1/3 of the capacity of the trains then we effectively remove at least 1/3 of the revenue. We could even consider that we remove much more given the standees are the most part the ones paying the highest prices for tickets.

No TOC in the history of rail travel has ever come up with an idea that could slash their revenue by such a high percentage. Half the passenger numbers and you must double what they’re paying.
 

Tetchytyke

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How do they plan to get rid of regulated fares?

Why do you think RDG are so desperate to game opinion polls (sorry, "customer consultation") to show that people want "simplification" and an "end to cliff-edge peak pricing".

Anyone who thinks that RDG members won't ramp fares up under the guise of simplification- just like they did when they changed ticket names- is naïve in the extreme. As for trusting the bearded tax dodger...
 

mrcheek

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If this is the case, Im really glad that Virgin Trains will soon be a thing of the past
 

Bletchleyite

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If VT had had a policy of no standing over the last weekend, particularly Friday and Monday, exactly how many extra trains would they have needed to run and in what paths to ensure that everyone who wanted to travel could travel? Would they just stop ticket sales and say sorry you cannot get home to Manchester because there are no seats?

That's exactly what SNCF etc do do. There are sometimes several days over which there are no available tickets. I bet Megabus and NatEx would rub their hands together with glee, as it's much cheaper and easier for them to add capacity by hiring private hire coaches in as duplicates. It is no coincidence at all that Spain has a very buoyant coach industry indeed. And France only doesn't because anticompetitive regulation banned it until the EU told them to pack it in, so it's in early days.

I do think this weekend was handled badly, though. There seems to be a view now that there's no need to provide comprehensive rail replacement (as was done during the WCML works in the early 2000s) and that alternative routes can cope. Not on a bank holiday they couldn't. What they perhaps should have done was to commission such a rail replacement scheme and then whack cheap Advances all over it. If NatEx/Megabus can run coaches profitably...
 

Tetchytyke

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For what it’s worth, I think it has some merit for some services at certain times of the day / week

The devil's in the detail. Beardy and his Godly pal when at VTEC prevented holders of super off peak tickets from reserving seats on the busiest trains (e.g. 1819 Newcastle), with seat reservations only available for advance tickets.

Like everything, what seems at face value to be a good idea is clouded by who is proposing it. I wouldn't believe Beardy if he told me today was Wednesday.
 

DarloRich

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surely all this is going to do is drive down capacity and drive up prices and ensure "commuter" trains are even busier.

What is long diatance? Is, say, Crewe to London long distance?
 
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Tetchytyke

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I do think this weekend was handled badly, though. There seems to be a view now that there's no need to provide comprehensive rail replacement (as was done during the WCML works in the early 2000s) and that alternative routes can cope.

The whole weekend was a disaster, no trains to London, no trains to the Lake District, no trains to Scotland, reduced services elsewhere. Absolutely shambolic.

Part of the trouble is that the Chiltern line is so much busier than it was 15 years ago, the "blockade busters" won't fit anymore.
 

Bletchleyite

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The whole weekend was a disaster, no trains to London, no trains to the Lake District, no trains to Scotland, reduced services elsewhere. Absolutely shambolic

Quite. I avoided it because it looked like overcrowding with the reduced frequencies and drove instead, a lot of traffic about but then it was the nicest Bank Holiday weather for years.

Part of the trouble is that the Chiltern line is so much busier than it was 15 years ago, the "blockade busters" won't fit anymore.

That is true, though a fleet of buses has been done before (including on Easter weekend) and should have been done, with Advances at reasonable levels to keep people off overcrowding the ECML.
 

hwl

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This is a very bad idea for the existing network in general (it might work on HS2 services due to the huge extra capacity being added on some routes), which Virgin keep proposing at every opportunity since privatisation as the current set up isn't a big enough licence for them to make profit.

It is very bad news for passengers.

The aim is to run fewer off peak services at quiet times and also bid for other operator paths at peak times ex reducing LNR services and forcing user on to their more expensive services.
 

smtglasgow

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I suspect Virgin have been stung by some of the horror stories that appear on social media - after all PR and protecting the brand seems to trump everything else. There was film on twitter last Thursday of one of the evening Glasgow trains looking like the last train out of a war zone, with dozens of people sat on the floor/vestibules/toilets. Didn’t BR use boarding cards? Before my time – did they work?
 

hwl

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I suspect Virgin have been stung by some of the horror stories that appear on social media - after all PR and protecting the brand seems to trump everything else. There was film on twitter last Thursday of one of the evening Glasgow trains looking like the last train out of a war zone, with dozens of people sat on the floor/vestibules/toilets. Didn’t BR use boarding cards? Before my time – did they work?
Unfortunately people will still want to travel and there would be equally bad PR if people couldn't. the world has moved on and it is much harder to protect Brands.
The solution would have been for VT to run extra trains later into the evening to add capacity instead of mostly returning to depots from 2000. (Given they were running far fewer over the long weekend perfectly do-able with some planning but they didn't)
 

cuccir

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The whole weekend was a disaster, no trains to London, no trains to the Lake District, no trains to Scotland, reduced services elsewhere. Absolutely shambolic.

It does seem like the overcrowding on long distance services was at just about its worse this weekend.

A Tweet on the LNER feed caught my eye, in response to customers complaining about the busyness of services:

In an ideal world, we would only sell a ticket per seat but we have to, by law, sell flexible tickets Tom. The Office for Road and Rail states there is no legal limit on the number of passengers on trains: (link: https://orr.gov.uk/rail/health-and-safety/passenger-safety/our-role-in-relation-to-station-and-train-crowding) orr.gov.uk/rail/health-an… ^KM

If you look at the LNER feed over much of the weekend, there's a lot of blaming busyness on flexible ticket holders. While this is just a Twitter team, there's a clear sense from multiple TOCs that they'd find a long-distance reservation system preferable in many ways. So I don't think it's just in Virgin that these views are held.

That said, I don't think we're likely to see anything like this introduced on a widespread scale across the rail network any time soon: it doesn't fit with an integrated network, with moves to encourage commuting, with people's expectations, etc. I wouldn't be surprised if one way of coping with engineering work in future would be to introduce reservation-only days though.
 

Kite159

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Virgin probably dislikes the fact that an off-peak return from London to Manchester is £89.60, which is valid on all the trains at weekends, so if they have a weekend where say Man City are playing a London based football team they can't ramp up the prices of advance fares to get more revenue. "But oh yes, you can travel for £20 on the 05:35 Manchester - Euston train which we predict will be quiet"

Also they probably prefer folk to use advance fares as they get to keep all of the revenue, rather than having to share part of the revenue for an off-peak return with other operators.

This past weekend LNER probably had extra passengers from Scotland who would have used Virgin had Euston been open [probably also from Manchester as I think tickets were being accepted via Leeds]. Bank holiday weekends are always going to be busy, especially when school holidays come to an end, especially with the glorious weather experienced over easter.

I believe some Aberdeen/Inverness bound LNER services over the weekend were pick-up/set-down only in stations in England, so the first advertised stop would be Berwick-Upon-Tweed, and I think last year the Inverness - Kings Cross service was set-down only after Falkirk.

--------------

If the country does go down the route of requiring a seat reservation for everything, than it will be a case of the car winning.
 
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hwl

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The whole weekend was a disaster, no trains to London, no trains to the Lake District, no trains to Scotland, reduced services elsewhere. Absolutely shambolic.

Part of the trouble is that the Chiltern line is so much busier than it was 15 years ago, the "blockade busters" won't fit anymore.
As regards last weekend - East Coast capacity should improve in multiple ways within a year or two with IEP introduction (more stock and more seats), Extra TPE services at the Northern end, First OA operator and GTR running full weekend services helping diffuse Peterborough capacity issues.

Chiltern capacity needs addressing in the next franchise starting with the replacing loco and DVT use generating another 40m of useful train length and have enough stock to run full length trains.
 

Mitchell Hurd

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It's gonna be tricky I think but I don't blame Virgin Trains for doing this if I'm honest. XC should do this as their journeys are some of the longest in the UK.

For at least a few years, I've always objected to overcrowding on long-distance routes and no one should have to stand on a XC service. I bet with HST's in late InterCity swallow (and early Virgin Trains days) that crowding wasn't as bad on HST's or even the Mark 2 stock!
 

Bletchleyite

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It's gonna be tricky I think but I don't blame Virgin Trains for doing this if I'm honest. XC should do this as their journeys are some of the longest in the UK.

For at least a few years, I've always objected to overcrowding on long-distance routes and no one should have to stand on a XC service

There is another, better way of achieving that - stop all the pratting about with short DMUs. Every mainline service in the UK should be at least 160m long. The Dutch don't do this, the Swiss don't do this, the Germans don't do this (well, they do have short trains but they are double deckers so the capacity is gained another way).

Short DMUs are for branch lines.
 

071

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In competition terms it would be just like booking a seat on EasyJet and Ryanair, and you pay the price offered on the day (or not).
I'm not sure about the "running extra trains to meet demand", because there won't be idle trains lying around, any more than BA had spare Shuttle planes.
SNCF have, by our standards, very low utilisation of their TGV fleet, and can turn them out at peak days/times/seasons.
We tend to work our fleets to death every day, so nothing is spare.
[Bolding above is mine]

Actually, this is exactly what BA did on the Super Shuttle services.

There was 100% guaranteed seat availability even if you just rocked up and bought a ticket on the spot - full price return was £162 in 1989. If the aircraft was full, they put on another one - possibly just for you. Expensive? Yes, but judged worth it at the time.

Would never happen now, of course any more than there would be idle trains at peak times.

I believe lightly loaded aircraft flew quite frequently at the beginning of this service. I suspect that this is what led to the introduction of the Boeing 767, a wide-body aircraft normally used for long-haul flights, onto the Shuttles from Scotland. With 250 seats each, they were probably less likely to be full to capacity. These aircraft retired in 2018, although the Super Shuttle concept was killed off long before.
 

Glenn1969

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Or allow XC in particular to run more trains. Only one train an hour serving a city the size of Leeds in particular is not sufficient.

I have viewed the article on Railnews and note Mick Cash taking the opportunity for a dig at the system. I happen to be opposed to nationalisation because I remember the 70s/80s and think it would lead to less investment, not more. But I am a passenger not an expert
 

Bletchleyite

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Actually, this is exactly what BA did on the Super Shuttle services.

There was 100% guaranteed seat availability even if you just rocked up and bought a ticket on the spot - full price return was £162 in 1989. If the aircraft was full, they put on another one - possibly just for you. Expensive? Yes, but judged worth it at the time.

I believe a Concorde was used at least once.
 

CaptainHaddock

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There is another, better way of achieving that - stop all the pratting about with short DMUs. Every mainline service in the UK should be at least 160m long. The Dutch don't do this, the Swiss don't do this, the Germans don't do this (well, they do have short trains but they are double deckers so the capacity is gained another way).

Short DMUs are for branch lines.

Indeed. Virgin's plan may work on a 12 coach Pendolino but would be absolutely chaotic on a dinky little 4-coach Voyager!
 

Mitchell Hurd

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There is another, better way of achieving that - stop all the pratting about with short DMUs. Every mainline service in the UK should be at least 160m long. The Dutch don't do this, the Swiss don't do this, the Germans don't do this (well, they do have short trains but they are double deckers so the capacity is gained another way).

Short DMUs are for branch lines.

Agreed! Yesterday someone complained on Twitter to XC, asking that they're surely not about to send a 4-coach train (probably a Voyager) to Birmingham that goes to Tamworth and Derby etc when they've cancelled 2 trains before it. I think the disruption was a broken down freight train.
 

underbank

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A damn good idea to limit numbers so that there is no-one standing, so booked seats are definitely something to aim for. However, the only practical way it will work is that x number of seats are booked in advance and y number are available for "walk ups" on the day. That way people can still book a seat if their plans change, i.e. cancel their original booking and replace it with an earlier/later train. Of course, it'll need fine tuning and inevitably, some trains won't be full whilst others will be fully booked as no amount of fine tuning will ever be perfect. The important thing is that there'll still be some last-minute availability. Maybe only "open" the last minute ticket sales an hour before departure, so if you are too late, you'd be first in the queue for the next departure ahead of all the other "walk ups" just arriving. We really can't have a situation where you have to book days/weeks in advance and there's no walk up availability - if that ever happens, people will just go by air instead. Trains have the advantage of flexibility and that needs to be ring fenced. But, at the same time, prior bookings must be cancelled and transferred to a different service so that all booked seats are actually taken and used - none of this booking seats and not turning up nonsense.
 

philjo

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Where possible there should also be longer/additional trains run when there are major events. The May issue of Modern Railways reports that GWR are planning to run 12 coach 387s to move large number of passengers on additional services to Cardiff on rugby match days once the electrification is complete.
Obviously it is not always possible to run additional trains but those that do run should be at the maximum possible length.

Sporting fixtures are one type of event where you do not want to be tied to a specific train home. e.g. if you are at the Cricket and it rains all afternoon, everyone will go home early. similarly a day to the seaside is very weather dependent what time people would want to return home (or travel at all).
 
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