Train coaches overcrowded

I hate window seats due to the way most carriages are made, I get a pain in the hip because I can't sit straight as the sides curve in at the bottom(or worse some trains have a heater box robbing you of floor space)so I like aisle seats.

Just booked a return from Sheffield to St Pancras for 4th December, reserved seat at least. Hope it's not standing room only on the coaches.

Five coach trains are in fact pretty rare (or at least on the sort of non-intercity routes I presume you’re referring to); still plenty of four coach stuff out there, as well as two coach for a lot of the diesel units.

The new generation of intercity stuff built by Hitachi tends to come in five or nine car lengths, with two five car units able to operate together but offering no real seating capacity improvement over nine cars, owing to the space taken up with middle driving cabs and duplication of everything on board.

The greatest travesty by far remains the abomination that is Crosscountry, running Penzance to Edinburgh and everything in between with trains having only four or five coaches, poor internal design with three enormous disabled access toilets eating up space (everything else has one per train, with much smaller non-accessible facilities to supplement it where appropriate), and one full coach being just for First Class punters. An appalling situation perpetuated for over 20 years by various incompetent governments and their micromanagement.

Up until very recently some journeys on that route were operated with Crosscountry’s remaining HST (High Speed Train/“Intercity 125”) fleet, which were seven coaches long and a pleasure to travel on. These have now been removed on the DfT’s instruction, sold and shipped to Mexico or Nigeria for further use there, because clearly we don’t need them. No Sir. That in turn means that fewer services can be operated with two of the four or five coach Voyager trains running in pairs, as they’re now needed singularly to cover the former HST runs. Again, this is the government destroying things to save pennies. Idiots.

I dont know my trains, but I kniw what the hst125 looks lkke, and there were plenty of green ones around- GWR?? On the route

Yup, GWR once had a large fleet of them for their core intercity routes, they’ve since been replaced with new stuff but a small number were kept, fitted with automatic sliding doors and reduced to half length for some local work, as there just aren’t enough other diesel trains to go around. Even then they’ve had to fight with the DfT to keep hold of some, and a fair few have already been dispatched into storage to meet government cost cutting demands despite the obvious shortfall.

Just to provide the context to this so that it does become misinformation.

A coach length in a 12 car(3x 4 car units) formation is 20 meters, the coach lengths in the 10 coaches (2x 5 car units) are 24 meters long so you still have the same length of train (240 meters) and two less cabs which is now passenger space

It's likely been done to accommodate larger people.

Got on a thameslink 700 train yesterday and didn't mind the new style seats.

I bow my head to your train spotter nerdiness.
I just remember those blue seats being really good and since then they have all been crap. (apart from a 125 about 5 years ago)

I went MK to Wolvo and back over the last two days, both on Avanti WC.

Train there "my" seat F 5 was showing as available above it and somebody sat in it so I did the right thing and just found another seat. On the way back I got on at Wolvo to find F 5 showing as reserved from Coventry with somebody already sat in it. So I went and found another seat showing as reserved from Edinburgh (the trains departing station) only to be confronted by some furious women two minutes later, I had my headphones in so I didn't hear the whole conversation, my coat was on the seat next to me so I moved it and she sat down, squashing me against the window, she then proceeded to message about 15 people to say that "some bloke is sat in my seat", I couldn't help but notice this as she had the text on her screen turned up to extra large and kept opening her flippy case to check. She was also replying to a few people with "ok hun" . When we got to Rugby two seats opposite us became free so I was expecting her to jump over there.. but no.

I'm presuming the seating allocation system on both trains was messed up. At the end of the day the allocation is free so not worth the paper its written on. Both trains were quite full, a lot of people trying to keep their full size suitcases in the aisle.