I've been suffering from reservations recently. That's because I've been travelling on a lot of trains outside London, and you only get reservations on trains outside London. They started out as means to ration seats on busy services, but have metamorphosed into apparatus to allow people to book early and pay less for their tickets. I'm not a big fan of reservations, and here are a dozen reasons why.
1) Reservations take forever to come out of the ticket machine. Remember when tickets were single small pieces of card? Now they're issued as multiple coupons, sometimes 5 or 6 at a time, so there's a real risk that you accidentally leave one in the machine and then your ticket is useless. Also I always end up wasting time at the barrier trying to work out which of the identical orange rectangles is the one I currently need.
2) It's not always obvious where your lettered coach is going to stop before the train comes in. Some train companies make this obvious and stick letters on the platform. Others not so, and you can end up having to walk the length of the train very quickly ("Where's coach C? Where's coach C?) if you guess incorrectly.
3) Sometimes staff don't manage to put the paper reservations in the backs of the seat in time. If the train's delayed at its start point and there's no time for the guard to nip through with the cards, suddenly the entire reservation system collapses and the train degenerates into chaos.
4) Those electronic reservation indicators aren't especially helpful. They're hard to read, and unlike old fashioned paper reservations they never say which stations the seat is reserved between, just "Reserved". The more information the better, but these give far less.
5) You don't always get you what you asked for. On one journey last week I specifically ordered a window seat, but Virgin trains gave me one of their special glassless window seats with no view whatsoever, the bastards. There's no way I'd have chosen to sit there given free choice, but the reservation selection software dumped me in the dark seat anyway.
6) You don't always get the chance to ask for what you do want. I usually prefer a double seat, not a table seat, because that way I can avoid being suddenly surrounded by three loud people I didn't ask to endure a journey beside. But train companies don't offer the option of "not a table seat", they only offer "table seat?".
7) Reservations are inconsistently policed. You go to all that effort to sit in precisely the right seat, and then the ticket inspector doesn't even bother looking at your reservation. Or he gets all heavy-handed ("Can I see your railcard and reservation please?") and makes you feel like a guilty cheapskate.
8) Reservations are rarely policed. Even when someone official actually looks at a reservation, they're usually only interested whether you're on the right train and very rarely check to see if you're in the right seat. Which is annoying if somebody else isn't sitting in their proper seat.
9) Reservations generally have to be policed by passengers, not staff. It's always embarrassing to have to say "Excuse me, I think you're sitting in my seat." I walked onto one long distance train recently to my find my reserved seat occupied by one of a group of foreign students, and decided against saying anything because I didn't want to end up surrounded by the other seven.
10) It's not always obvious which seat number is by the window and which is by the aisle. These people who design graphics think they've made it oh so obvious which is which, but they're wrong. So if you turn up and one of the two seats is occupied, it's hard to argue that they're in the wrong one.
11) A heck of a lot of reserved seats never seem to get used. A byproduct of the insistence on printing a reservation with your ticket is that a lot of people never turn up, or sit somewhere else, or take another train. And that can leave a forest of seats annoyingly unavailable, when really nobody ever had any intention of sitting in them.
12) You end up crammed in the cheap carriage. The most crowded carriage on a long-distance train is usually the one full of people with reservations. The booking software tends to dump everyone together, creating a mostly-reservations carriage, and leaving the rest of the train (where I'd much prefer to sit) rather emptier. Would it really hurt to space us out a bit more? Or indeed simply to reserve us onto the train, not into a specific seat?
There's nothing worse than an automated inconsistent bureaucratic suboptimal incompetent nannying system, and that's what rail ticket reservations appear to have evolved into.
50years@BBC2 1964 Play School, Horizon, Match Of The Day, The Likely Lads; 1965 Call My Bluff, Man Alive, Not Only But Also; 1966 The Money Programme, Chronicle; 1967 The Forsyte Saga, colour television; 1968 Gardeners' World; 1969 Pot Black, Civilisation, Q; 1970 The Goodies; 1971 Open University; Face The Music; The Old Grey Whistle Test; Play Away; 1972; 1973 The Ascent Of Man; 1974; 1975 Fawlty Towers, Arena; 1976 I Claudius, One Man And His Dog; 1977 Abigail's Party, Top Gear; 1978 The Great Egg Race; 1979 Life On Earth, Not The Nine O'Clock News, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy; 1980 Great Railway Journeys of the World, Newsnight, The Adventure Game, Yes Minister, Training Dogs The Woodhouse Way; 1981 See Hear, The HitchHiker's Guide To The Galaxy; 1982 The Young Ones; 1983 Boys From The Blackstuff; 1984 Floyd On Fish, Threads; 1985 Live Aid, Edge of Darkness, Acorn Antiques; 1986 A Very Peculiar Practice, A Bit Of Fry And Laurie, The Life And Loves Of A She Devil; 1987 French And Saunders, Tutti Frutti; 1988 Red Dwarf, Def II; 1989 The Late Show; 1990 Have I Got News For You, The Mary Whitehouse Experience, Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit; 1991 Probably The Best Logos In The History Of The World Ever; 1992 Absolutely Fabulous, Later... with Jools Holland; 1993 Shooting Stars, The Wrong Trousers; 1994 Ready Steady Cook, The Day Today, The Fast Show; 1995 Room 101; 1996 Never Mind The Buzzcocks, This Life, Sister Wendy's Story of Painting, Our Friends In The North; 1997 Ground Force, I'm Alan Partridge, Robot Wars, Holding On, Teletubbies; 1998 Goodness Gracious Me, The Royle Family; 1999 The League Of Gentlemen, The Naked Chef; 2000 The Weakest Link; 2001 The Office; What Not To Wear; 2002 Look Around You, Balamory; 2003 Little Britain, Restoration, QI; 2004 The Catherine Tate Show, Who Do You Think You Are?; 2005 The Apprentice, Mock The Week, Dragons' Den, Springwatch; 2006 The Choir; 2007 The Restaurant, In The Night Garden, The Tudors; 2008 Maestro; 2009 Miranda, Pointless; 2010 The Great British Bake Off, Great British Railway Journeys, Wonders of the Solar System; 2011 Stargazing Live; 2012 Line of Duty; 2013 The Great British Sewing Bee, The Wrong Mans, An Adventure in Space and Time; 2014 Inside No. 9, House of Fools
1964 Play School, Horizon, Match Of The Day, The Likely Lads; 1965 Call My Bluff, Man Alive, Not Only But Also; 1966 The Money Programme, Chronicle; 1967 The Forsyte Saga, colour television; 1968 Gardeners' World; 1969 Pot Black, Civilisation, Q; 1970 The Goodies; 1971 Open University; Face The Music; The Old Grey Whistle Test; Play Away; 1972; 1973 The Ascent Of Man; 1974; 1975 Fawlty Towers, Arena; 1976 I Claudius, One Man And His Dog; 1977 Abigail's Party, Top Gear; 1978 The Great Egg Race; 1979 Life On Earth, Not The Nine O'Clock News, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy; 1980 Great Railway Journeys of the World, Newsnight, The Adventure Game, Yes Minister, Training Dogs The Woodhouse Way; 1981 See Hear, The HitchHiker's Guide To The Galaxy; 1982 The Young Ones; 1983 Boys From The Blackstuff; 1984 Floyd On Fish, Threads; 1985 Live Aid, Edge of Darkness, Acorn Antiques; 1986 A Very Peculiar Practice, A Bit Of Fry And Laurie, The Life And Loves Of A She Devil; 1987 French And Saunders, Tutti Frutti; 1988 Red Dwarf, Def II; 1989 The Late Show; 1990 Have I Got News For You, The Mary Whitehouse Experience, Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit; 1991 Probably The Best Logos In The History Of The World Ever; 1992 Absolutely Fabulous, Later... with Jools Holland; 1993 Shooting Stars, The Wrong Trousers; 1994 Ready Steady Cook, The Day Today, The Fast Show; 1995 Room 101; 1996 Never Mind The Buzzcocks, This Life, Sister Wendy's Story of Painting, Our Friends In The North; 1997 Ground Force, I'm Alan Partridge, Robot Wars, Holding On, Teletubbies; 1998 Goodness Gracious Me, The Royle Family; 1999 The League Of Gentlemen, The Naked Chef; 2000 The Weakest Link; 2001 The Office; What Not To Wear; 2002 Look Around You, Balamory; 2003 Little Britain, Restoration, QI; 2004 The Catherine Tate Show, Who Do You Think You Are?; 2005 The Apprentice, Mock The Week, Dragons' Den, Springwatch; 2006 The Choir; 2007 The Restaurant, In The Night Garden, The Tudors; 2008 Maestro; 2009 Miranda, Pointless; 2010 The Great British Bake Off, Great British Railway Journeys, Wonders of the Solar System; 2011 Stargazing Live; 2012 Line of Duty; 2013 The Great British Sewing Bee, The Wrong Mans, An Adventure in Space and Time; 2014 Inside No. 9, House of Fools
