Quiet Carriage / Coach: restrictions and issues - ongoing discussion, merged topic

[whole diary]

[willc]

This morning noticed a fresh, but I would say flawed, attempt to make sure people know they are sitting in a quiet carrriage.

It is a pink stick-on strip, running the length of a window, applied on about half the windows each side of coach A - didn't notice if G in first class had also been done.

Noticeable, yes. Unfortunately, all it has on it are the words 'Quiet Carriage' even though there is plenty of room to put on symbols of crossed-out mobile phones and personal stereos. At least the previous blue stickers did have a crossed-out mobile. I think Chiltern's quiet carriages also have a silhouette of a person going Shhhh, or something similar.

Why can't GW^▸ (Great Western) get something this simple right? My favourite bit of the whole thing is that notice on the bulkhead of the ex-toilet, which is the only thing in the entire coach that actually says phones and stereos are banned. You can only see it on the way out of the coach.

[Ollie]

Yea either clutter up the window with stickers, or get people to understand what quiet means..

By the way coach G has them too.

[smokey]

Yea either clutter up the window with stickers, or get people to understand what quiet means..

By the way coach G has them too.

You can put stickers above or below windows, but that's to sensible for FGW^▸ (First Great Western).

[Btline]

Put them on the back of seats!

Esp. easy for FGW^▸ (First Great Western) HSTs^▸ (High Speed Train) with the lack of tables.

[IndustryInsider]

Put them on the back of seats!

Esp. easy for FGW^▸ (First Great Western) HSTs^▸ (High Speed Train) with the lack of tables.

And an easy target for anyone slightly bored/restless/juvenile/eager to pick at something sticky in front of them!

[6 OF 2 redundant adjunct of unimatrix 01]

children and chavs in first class is more irritating!! i dont do it very often but if im traveling and i have a headache or dont feel well i will go first class and the only time ive ever had the classic shouting screaming kid who sits behind you and kicks your seat was in first class.....makes you wanna kill kids!! is there a bylaw making that legal?

[Btline]

Put them on the back of seats!

Esp. easy for FGW^▸ (First Great Western) HSTs^▸ (High Speed Train) with the lack of tables.

And an easy target for anyone slightly bored/restless/juvenile/eager to pick at something sticky in front of them!

True (when I was in Scotland this summer, a bored person peeled a "Keep your feet of the seats" sign off).

So how about a stamp? Or an in-print on the back of the seat?

[miniman]

Surely it is not beyond the wit of man, woman or even FGW^▸ (First Great Western) to realise that when you sell 2 adult and 2 child tickets to the same person, the quiet coach is not the place to seat them? Currently there are 2 separate families with noisy kids sat in the quiet coach. Clearly no-one (not even me!) would expect kids to keep quiet for 2 hours sat in a train - so why put them in the quiet coach?!?!?

[Phil]

I think the problem here is that no reasonable person would ever expect children to remain quiet for any length of time.

However, if FGW^▸ (First Great Western) were to introduce legislation barring children from Quiet Carriages, or even admit in writing that children were to be discouraged from travelling in Quiet Carriages, they would immediately open themselves up to disapproving comments from do-gooders and busybodies convinced that their particular golden children were the exception to any such rule, that they (FGW) have no right to make such assumptions, and to headlines from the no-doubt well-meaning national media describing such behaviour as scandalous, demeaning, divisive, and Whatever Next - Should We Be Banning Johnny Foreigner As Well Since It's Well Known That They Talk Quite Loudly (etc)

*sighs*

[devonian]

How advanced is the system? Would it recognise the fact that there are two child tickets being bought with an adult ticket? Could it not "discretely" allocate sets not in the quiet carriages unless specifically requested buy the customer?

How does the reservation system work on a whole? Is it random or does it start at the front and work its way to the back?

[miniman]

How advanced is the system? Would it recognise the fact that there are two child tickets being bought with an adult ticket? Could it not "discretely" allocate sets not in the quiet carriages unless specifically requested buy the customer?

Exactly. It should NOT be hard to program a system to never place a child reservation in A or G (quite who would pay first class fares for the kids is beyond me, but anyway...). If someone specifically wants to sit in there with kids, they should be free to do so on the proviso that the kids keep quiet. The people in A this morning were not there by choice.

As a semi-comical aside, one woman was moaning to her companion about said children on arrival to Paddington. I politely (ish) reminded her that they had clearly been given the seats as reservations so it wasn't really their fault. Of course, she might well have spotted this, had she not been blind 

[simonw]

It is quite simply, in quiet coaches do not accept bookings for more that one person!

This would discourage families; and business colleagues having having a noisy meeting using insulting and derogatory language about the customer/client they had met (last thursday on the 16:15 London Padding - Swansea).

[Trowres]

This topic looks like one for a sociologist's lament over both lack of consideration for other humans and - equally - intolerance 

There are varying degrees of noisy children, just as there are varying levels of tinny sound from personal music systems, and varying degrees of profanity in mobile phone conversations. I'd guess from experience that about 5% of kids encountered are worse than the other two noise irritations mentioned, and 95% better.  - not a strong case for excluding them from the quiet coach.

[plymothian]

By the looks of things there is no distinction between normal and quiet coaches on the reservations system, I tried to book seats once online and just got shoved around coach A each time until the system told me there were no more seats left.

(Actually there's a bit more to this saga with seat reservations, but that's another thread and involves one other TOC^▸ (Train Operating Company))

[willc]

But let's not forget that if a booking clerk is trying desperately to find somewhere to seat a group of four people together at a table, then high-capacity HST^▸ (High Speed Train) seating gives them precious few options to start with...

And I'd agree with Trowres, most children are far less of a nuisance than the mobile phone and 'personal' stereo brigade any day, which brings us back yet again to the utter uselessness of FGW^▸ (First Great Western)'s current notices in Quiet coaches, both the blue stickers and the new strips. I've travelled twice this week on a set with the stupid strips on the windows, and people are already trying to peel them off.

As I left coach A at Oxford yesterday morning, there were two teenagers sat right underneath one of the silly strips listening to iPods without a care in the world and a lot of pissed-off OAPs sitting around them, apparently too polite to tell them to go elsewhere.