Thanks. That explains it. Looks like I missed the small print.

I'm currently a Gold Card holder between Didcot Parkway and London Paddington so as a benefit of this I have been able to get my wife a Network Rail card for ^1.

My wife has used this Network Rail card between Didcot and Paddington on a number of occasions now to get 1/3 off the standard fare with no issues, however when she tried to use it yesterday to buy a ticket between Didcot and Oxford (at ~14:00) she was told that her Network Rail  card couldn't be used and she ended up having to pay the full fare without getting the 1/3 discount. She obviously didn't know any better so just accepted it and paid the full fare.

I have checked the Network Railcard routes and the route between Didcot and Oxford is definitely shown as a valid route...

http://www.railcard.co.uk/clientfiles/files/map.pdf

Does anyone know if there are any specific restrictions on the Didcot to Oxford route using a Network Rail card that we're unaware of (I can't seem to find any) or if the customer sales assistant probably just didn't know what they were talking about and incorrectly rejected my wife's Network Rail card?

I didn't actually know that. It looks like you're right...

http://www.nationalrail.co.uk/times_fares/season_tickets/goldcard.html

Ignore my last comment then!

@tkimber - is your season ticket an annual one (gold card)?

I guess we'll never know I now seem to have exhaused every possible way of finding out

Well it's now time to conclude this saga.

Following a PM on this board from Jo (FGW^▸ (First Great Western)) who offered to contact the station manager at Bristol Temple Meads on my behalf, I was extremely grateful for her offer of help and thought this would be the best possible avenue so I sent her details of the lost keys but that turned out to be a complete waste of time because I never heard anything back from her, not even an acknowlegement, so it seems that all of the FGW customer service areas are as unreliable as each other

I was about to take Chris up on his offer (thanks again Chris) but a trip to the region then cropped up so I thought it might be a good idea to take a detour and drop into Temple Meads station which I did today. What I discovered when I arrived at the lost property office was almost unbelievable and it's no wonder FGW end up with so much unclaimed lost property to dispose of. It's actually even more of a shambles than I originally thought it was.

On arriving at the lost property desk I asked the staff member on duty about the lost keys. He then just pointed to two large A4 folders and told me that if the keys had been found then the details would be in there somewhere. He opened one of the folders and to my amazement it was just packed to the brim with sheets of paper containing hand-written details of every lost property item that had been handed in. Slightly puzzled I questioned him about the so called database and asked why he couldn't just search it on the computer. He then proceeded to tell me that descriptions of all lost property items were just hand-written into the folders by the staff at Bristol and the A4 sheets then get periodically faxed(!) off to Plymouth where someone there then enters details into the database which the Indian call centre uses to search on. He said the Bristol office don't have access to the lost property database and they just have to manually look through the folders if someone comes to the office enquiring about a lost item! I almost had to lift my jaw off the floor. The words FGW, dark ages, arse and elbow spring to mind here.

Seeing some of the entries in the folders, not only were there hundreds of them for the past month alone spanning many pages but some of the hand writing wasn't that easy to read either, so factor in that plus the poor quality that you usually get on the receiving end of a fax, then someone at Plymouth trying to decipher the text from that and type something meaningful into the database that someone at the Indian call centre might be able to understand. Not to mention the fact that the descriptions entered all seemed pretty brief and nothing to really to help an owner identify some of the items as specifically being theirs. I must have seen at least 20 iPhones with the description simply being "iPhone". I'm surprised anything gets reunited with it's owner at all. God help anyone who loses an item on FGW property and good luck trying to get it back even if FGW do actually have it in their lost property stock room!

I have to give credit to the guy at the lost property office though because he was very helpful and spent a good 10 minutes pain stakingly going through hundreds of hand-written enties in the folder for the past five weeks but unfortunately he drew a blank so the keys either didn't end up at the FGW lost property or the hand-writing of any entry for them wasn't deciperable but it looks like that avenue is now closed anyway.

For future reference, the 01752 20835777 phone number no longer works so the offshore call centre is the only line of communication.

Most of the lost keys on the ring aren't particularly important and could easily be replaced at little cost, however the two car keys are going to cost the best part of ^400 to replace and get cut/coded to the cars so understandably my parents don't really want to fork out this kind of money until they are absolutely sure the keys aren't sitting in the Bristol lost property office which is now going to require a personal visit by someone to ascertain this.

To add to the discussion in the previous few posts, I don't think a direct line to the lost property office is necessary but certainly a UK^▸ (United Kingdom) based call centre where there is going to be no or little communication issues and where you at least feel reassured that they have tried to do their best to correctly search the inventory. Something that certainly hasn't been the case with the offshore call centre in this particular instance.

It's the typing of the full description to search the database for a lost item which is where the problem is when there are clearly some communication issues.

The frustration I have is that when describing the lost keys to the Indian call centre operators, on all occasions I've had to repeat what I'm telling them to try and make them understand the description I'm giving. So you can probably appreciate why I've now lost all confidence that they've fully understood my description and why I no longer trust that any search criteria they might be typing into the computer acurately reflects what I've told them or is even spelt correctly which is what a computer system relies on to find data being asked for.

It therefore seems the only way to get peace of mind that the inventory is being searched correctly is by speaking to someone on the ground in the Bristol office where there will be no communication issues, but as this clearly can't be done by phone, the only way is to visit in person which for a majority of people will be a massive inconvienience in terms of time and cost. Maybe FGW^▸ (First Great Western) would like to offer me a free return ticket to Bristol so I can do this without being out of pocket.

Thanks for posting the 01752 number. I'll give it a try but I'm guessing I will probably just be told to call the main FGW lost property line.

The person who replied to me on twitter was "Alex". Does anyone know if he's from Serco or the in-house FGW^▸ (First Great Western) team?

Good point. Clouded by my frustration I actually forgot about that. I guess any figures will remain their secret.

Well I got a reply to my tweets only to confirm that other than visiting the lost property office in person, the only way of contacting them is via the Indian call centre. Completely useless and not helpful at all. Any FGW^▸ (First Great Western) customers better just pray they don't lose an item on a FGW train or premises because even if they have it there seems to be slim chance of actually getting it back.

I'll certainly be writing a letter of complaint to FGW about their unacceptable lost property service. It's clearly profit before customer service with this company.

I also have a good mind to make a FOI^▸ (Freedom of Information) request asking them to provide me with statistics on how many lost property items they took in last year and how many were actually reunited with their owners. I bet it's not many.

Thanks guys. I've just tried to phone again but it's turning out to be fruitless. The operator is clearly just reading from an on-screen script and after describing all my lost keys yet again I was put on hold so they could do a check. Approximately 10 seconds later they came back and said nothing had been found matching my description. There is no way they contacted Bristol in that time and I can't believe they managed to type in enough details to do thorough enough search in that short time scale so I have no faith whatsoever that a proper check is being done on the lost property inventory. It is just so frustrating.

I asked if I could speak to someone in Bristol direct and was again told that they have no number they can give me but said I could visit the Bristol office in person if I wanted to. This is really appalling customer service from FGW^▸ (First Great Western) when they are raking in so much profit.

I don't do facebook but I've now made my first ever tweet to @FGW so I shall see if there is any response and go from there.

@Chris - I really appreciate your offer to go to the office for me so many thanks for this. If no other options turn up I may well be in touch to take you up on your offer. It really shouldn't be like this though...customers having to rely on other customers to help them out

I wonder how many people actually get their lost property back which IS actually sitting in the store room at Bristol. Probably not many if my experience is anything to go by.

Last week my mother managed to leave a bunch of keys in the toilet on one of the platforms of a FGW^▸ (First Great Western) station. We went back the next day but unfortunately they were already gone. Hoping a cleaner had found them and handed them in, we asked at the station office only to be told that if they had been found then they would have been sent on to the lost property office in Bristol.

No problem I thought so I looked on the FGW website to find that I should allow 5 days before calling the lost property phone number to give lost property time to arrive and be checked in which I did.

So today I phoned the lost property line to find that I end up at what appears to be an Indian call centre. With all due respect to them they are just doing their job so it's not their fault but having to explain exact details of all the keys and then explain what a "Ford" key and a "Renault" key actually was didn't really inspire much confidence. The operator then tells me to hold the line while they contact Bristol. Knowing that the information I had tried explaining to them was just going to be relayed onto someone else (Chinese whispers springs to mind here), it didn't really fill me with a lot of hope that the keys would be located. As it turned out though that was irrelevant anyway because Bristol apparently weren't answering their phone so I was just told to just try calling again later.

I ended up ringing twice more only to get a different operator and having to go through the same rigmarole of describing the lost keys each time but it was the same outcome every time with the Bristol office apparently not answering their phone! It seemed ludicrous that a middle man in India was just being used to relay information from me to Bristol so I asked for a direct number for Bristol only to be told that they don't know the actual number is so they can't give it out to me

By now I'm pulling my hair out because all I want to do is to speak to someone in Bristol and give them a first-hand description of the keys so I can find out if they've ended up there but it seems like an almost impossible task. How on earth are people supposed to try and get their lost property back?

Short of me actually getting in a car and driving to the Bristol lost property office in person, does anyone have a direct number or know how I can get in contact with the Bristol office without having to go through the Indian call centre?

The idea of this thread was to try and create some constructive discussion about seat reservations and not about it being for people to start "attacking" each other which is what it seems to have descended into

Maybe you'd like to read the WHOLE thread properly first before accusing ME of going off-topic in my own thread. If you're not sure then please see post #67 in this thread where you will see who started the "off-topic" pricing comments. I simply gave a response (rather than just ignoring it) and as you will see at the bottom of my response (post #69), I said that any pricing discussion should be done in a new topic. The pricing continued to be discussed / argued so I re-iterated that I would refuse to comment any further on pricing issues in this particular thread (post #74).