I disagree. You’re telling me Virgin/Dft put out a tender and said “crucial trains have no more than 62 seats per carriage”? Or did Bombardier chose to meet the spec by designing the train like that?
The spec required -
Originally 3 classes, the rules determined an accessible toilet for each class, hence too many accessible toilets
Originally the rules on passengers travelling in leading vehicles at 125mph required large crumple zones (before this passengers were not allowed in leading vehicles at over 100mph)
Luggage space, the desire to have a "shop" instead of purely a trolley service and the 'tilt profile' did the rest.
To me they were built to spec as per the rules on accessibility and crashworthiness and requirements of the TOC (shop, 3 classes planned etc)
I don't see how the builder did anything to deliberately reduce accommodation based on the criteria they had to follow.
And I don't think the DfT/Virgin specifically said they wanted only 62 seats max in a vehicle, simply the design that met the requirements produced a train with such constraints that it was inevitable such short comings would occur.
In essence the spec produced what Virgin got and it signed off on. What else were they going to do? Refuse the whole fleet?
Given the tight constraints the only options I see are taking out luggage racks or undertaking a lengthy rebuild to remove the extra disabled toilets, which of course would involve additional cost and delay introduction to service. And who's going to pay that additional cost in time and money?