The examples I was thinking about are mainly around GWR▸ services in the Bath area. Certainly the service I commute home from work on is often made up of 2 x 150/1, so those who join the service intending to alight at Avoncliff are often told via an announcement on the train to use the stop at Bath Spa to get into the correct part of the train (as only the local door is opened at Avoncliff due to the short platform). And I can't imagine that is a rare occurrence (Gilfach Fargoed would also be one with ATW▸ if a doubled up pacer is ever used on the Rhymney line).
Ah; that is a problem. I was thinking the breaches of my rule would mainly be portion-working, and I'm not aware of all that many examples of that practice that don't use stock with
UEGs▸ (Unit End Gangways). Liverpool-Norwich, Aberystwyth-Birmingham and Waterloo-Exeter for example all use class 158s (and 159s in the case of the latter) and Southern use class 377s. As for short platforms, I guess I'd assumed they would stop with the middle of the train platformed and open one door on each unit, but I could easily be wrong there (I've never been up the Rhymney line, so I don't know if they do this with the double Pacers).
Ahh that makes a bit more sense, sorry for misreading! Certainly I would agree that something like that should be taken into account by ToC's, though I am not sure how realistic it would be since choice of rolling stock isn't exactly a thing for many ToC's and lengthening platforms isn't always possible either!
Good point; they don't tend to have much choice of stock although changes are normally made to at least part of the fleet each time a franchise is relet and that's somewhere things certainly could, and should, be different. At the recent Northern reletting for example, the new trains should have been specified with UEGs and perhaps some 150/1s disposed of with some 153s converted back into 155s instead.
I realise we've gone off-topic there, so to move back towards relevance then I will say that the GWR franchise should either roster a 9-car unit for the London-Carmarthen services, make provision to run a 5-car unit throughout without it being swammped at any point between Swansea and London (by removing calls or making them pickup/set-down only as appropriate) or should have ordered some units of 6, 7 or 8 coaches for the service (and similar ones) as appropriate to the loadings.
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