Sunday, November 18, 2007

Trains and Pains

We spent five hours on a Virgin train today travelling from Oxford to York. It wasn't delayed, it was just slow. Technically we could have switched to a faster train at Birmingham or at Doncaster but we were being a little lazy and I tend to be of the opinion that it's better to stay on a train that is definitely running than to switch to a faster train that may not be there.

Virgin have taken recently to running most of their trains as two trains joined together. This is fine, it means more seats, except that they have one of the trains as all reserved and the one one as all unreserved. Hence if you get on the train and it then leaves the station, it's easy to have trouble getting a seat at busy times. I don't really understand why they don't have a mixture of reserved and unreserved seats in each half.

This problem resulted in us having to change train-halves at Birmingham. Which was a little annoying but better than standing for a few hours which we might have had to do if we hadn't been able to find a seat.

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