And that's good customer service, is it? Not providing enough seats.
Or is this a boasting thing? You can stand from Yorkshire to London so we all should?
If only someone was proposing a new railway line so that there was a lot more capacity so that standing on a train wasn't needed.
I've done my share of standing on trains, I can assure you that I would rather do that than not travel (some very busy very hot services where the 12 coach train in front was cancelled and the service which was rubbing was 5 coaches and always had people standing on it).
With regards to business travel, I've been responsible for staff who have charge or rates to customers of £40-£80 per hour they would be very unhappy if we billed then for even 1 extra hour because they were sat in a pub waiting for their next train or we charged them for multiple tickets (even if it was cheaper). Likewise my boss wouldn't be very unhappy if they weren't earning the company money by then sitting in the pub rather than back in the office or the company were footing the bill for tickets which aren't needed.
Business meetings can overrun, clients may wish to talk to you about a new project or you may be asked to go somewhere else on your way back (I've even had the case where I was sent to the wrong place but could still use my ticket to get to the right place as it was on a permitted route, well other than a short extra return ticket as it wasn't exactly on the route) Likewise there could be a problem with another mode of travel, or it takes longer than expected (i.e. you just miss one service) or it takes longer to walk then expected (in one example there was a protest which meant that I opted to walk a different route rather than potentially get caught up in it). As such there's lots of reasons why you may not be able to get on the exact service you planned to get.
Business is now accepting of our happening with flights as:
- There's fewer flights to pick from
- A lot fewer journeys are made by flying
- The distances involved means that people are often out of the office for a full day anyway, so are costed accordingly
Remove that flexibility and business will abandon rail travel faster than rats from a sinking ship. If you can't use rail for business travel then you'll need a car, which means that you won't be commuting by train and you'll drive when going places for lesure purposes.
That's a lot of income from each person that impacts, in one year for me that could have been over £3,000 of ticket sales. Multiply that up by even 1,000 people and that's £3 million of lost income to the industry. However even then £3,000 in a year isn't a particularly high amount of ticket sales for someone who is commuting by rail, likewise it's likely to be a lot more than 1,000 people.
If we had trains able to carry 1,100 people seated and normally when they were busy they were carrying 800 people then I could see that with technology it could work, but if that's the case why bother?