Great Western Coffee Shop

Current paper/PDF timetable: "You must reserve a bike space on many of our services"

May paper/PDF timetable: "On our IETs bike reservations are strongly advised"

Emphasis mine. So it looks like GWR are relaxing the requirement for bikes to be booked in advance. I believe guards have confirmed this to passengers.)

A sensible change, especially with more IET’s now being increasingly used on regional services with more frequent stops.

Doesn't this mean that given the limited / inflexible space for bikes, it increases the chances that someone reserves a space and on the day finds it already occupied.

Mark

Or, worse still, two or more people arrive with bikes, only to find there's room for only one machine. Who takes the space, who rides?

(Reminds me when I took a train from Reading to Dorking to watch the Olympics cycling road race near Dorking in 2012. The train filled up at Reading and people were arriving with their bikes only to be turned away. The roads between the two places aren't direct, but I used to reckon it was about 37 miles by bike, so the disappointed riders - well, some of them - could have ridden there in a couple of hours and still caught the race.)

I guess it depends if the reservation displays are working, and how many of the "bike and bulk" spaces are available for reservation. In practice, it does seem that GWR guards are increasingly happy to let bikes on without reservations and use any of the spaces - in this part of the world at least.

What date will these changes apply from? I know it's 'May timetable' but what date in May?

21st May 2023 (Sunday)
Weekday changes from 22nd May
Saturday changes from 27th May

The reservation system has always been fairly pointless when you didn't have to reserve for luggage in the same space. I find that most TMs have benn pragmatic about it because the realise the shortcomings in the idea.

You want some fairly forthright comments on the infrastructure provided:
https://road.cc/content/news/why-taking-your-bike-train-such-faff-301335 (https://road.cc/content/news/why-taking-your-bike-train-such-faff-301335)

Where is that person/organisation?

There seems to have been a recent change in station announcements at Paddington to reflect this change.

The ‘You can only bring a bicycle on board if you have booked beforehand’ is now something along the lines of ‘A cycle reservation is recommended otherwise we can’t guarantee space will be available’.

Better late than never!

Anecdotal evidence of a couple from Reading last Summer wanting a cycling holiday in the South Hams. They booked Advance tickets to Totnes from Reading on a Sunday and Advance tickets for their return on the following Sunday. Reserving bike spaces in both directions. The outward journey presented no problems. However, they were unable to put their bikes on their chosen return because of unreserved bikes occupying all spaces. The following two services were cancelled and only after pleading with the TM on the next service were they allowed to board with their bikes.  A total mess, given they also had Advance tickets for their originally chosen service!

If they had bike reservations, why didn't the TM turf out the unreserved bikes that were taking up their spaces?

I expect because he/she would have had to have some means of working out which ones were not reserved, and who had put them on, and risked abuse (or worse) from the owners of the ejected bikes.

This will only work if there is some means of allocating and clearly marking reserved bike spaces, or issuing some kind of stick-on ticket to identify a reserved bike.

Good points ... and I would note that with passengers joining at an intermediate station, the time to resolve the booking and reservation issue would be limited, even if the train manager happened to be in the vicinity of the cycle spaces.

I genuinely thought that a sensible, logical, customer oriented system along these lines must have existed - I should of course have known better given it's the railway.

OK so what would that look like? How would it be operated?

I didn’t use the system in Germany, but as a casual observer I think their system works something like this: The bike spaces are numbered, and the passenger has a reservation ticket with that number on it.

Seemed to work better than the seat reservation system, which often had a really useful sign at every seat showing words to the effect of ‘This seat might be reserved’.

All bike spaces on IETs are numbered and have a reservation/available display. 

The passenger needs the carriage letter on a reservation confirmation to know which carriage to head for. 

The storage areas on each train that are the designated cycle spaces need to be more clearly marked as such to lessen that chances of prams and luggage being put in there. 

TM's should have a quick and easy method of checking at which station(s) booked cycles will be boarding and alighting.