Left luggage underneath seats 1 and 2, will it be spotted?

[whole diary]

[orjennings]

Hi there,

Apologies in advance if this is not the correct place to post this.

I left a rucksack underneath my seat on the GWR^▸ (Great Western Railway) from Bristol TM^▸ (Train Manager, or possibly Ticket Machine, depending on context) to Paddington 4 days ago.

I have registered with Lost property on GWR (Missing X) and at Paddington (lostproperty.org) but nothing has turned up.

I am wondering whether the bag would stay hidden for longer than usual because it is under seats 1 and 2, which are the first 2 seats as you enter the carriage and the bag is tucked in the corner.

Has anyone had any experience of this?

Or does anyone know how thoroughly the carriages are cleaned at the end of the day/line?

I'm wondering whether i should go to Paddington and have a look myself?

Would that train be going back and forth between Bristol and London all day?

If so I reckon it'd take about 4.5 hours to get back to Paddington, with 2 trains an hour there should be about 9 trains to check in 4 hours, not too bad.

If anyone can help it'd be much appreciated.

Cheers

[IndustryInsider]

It might be missed when cleaned at a terminating station, but I’d be very surprised if it was missed during overnight cleaning as that is pretty thorough - hoovering under seats and so on.  Bear in mind the type of train you were on serves many destinations throughout the week (unless it happened to be one of the new IET^▸ (Intercity Express Train - replacement for HSTs (manufactured by Hitachi in Kobe, Japan))’s), so it would not just be a case of checking all arrivals from Bristol.

Depending where it was found, it can take several days to filter through the systems, and of course it could also have been nicked!

[broadgage]

The chances of the bag still being on the train are IMO^▸ ('in my opinion') negligible after some days.
The chances of the actual train being used on the same route is small. As an example, one train that I regularly use from Paddington to Penzance arrives not from Penzance but from Paignton. Many other permutations exist.

With todays concerns regarding terrorism, trains are meant to be checked for unattended bags frequently. I suspect that the odd check is missed at times, but not for four days.

I fear that your luggage may have been stolen, but it might still be en-route to the lost property office, so keep checking.
There is a small chance that it was regarded as being sufficiently suspicious to merit destruction by the security services.

[Richard Fairhurst]

(I've merged the two topics on the same subject into one --Richard)

[the void]

If you leave an item on a train, the theory is it will be found at the end of the journey and handled by the operator of that location, which will not necessarily be the same operator as the train service. So if you leave a bag on a train into Paddington, it should in theory be found by the cleaners and handed into the lost property office there, which is managed by Excess Baggage on behalf of Network Rail. In practice, however, items can easily be missed by the cleaners, especially if trains are running late, so often items won't be found until later in the day, at a completely different location. If found at any GWR^▸ (Great Western Railway) location an item will make its way to the GWR lost property office in Bristol within seven days (some stations send daily, some a few times a week, others once a week, depending on how much stuff they recover). Of course there are other locations that GWR trains travel to that are not operated by GWR. If the next journey your train made was into South Wales (or Hereford) then your bag could easily have been found by the cleaners there, in which case it would be handled by Arriva Trains Wales. So if it's not turned up at Paddington or Bristol, try ATW^▸ (Arriva Trains Wales (former Train Operating Company)) too. Items found at Laira, Long Rock, Old Oak Common, Reading and St Philips Marsh depots all get sent to Bristol. But items found at Landore are handed in at Swansea and processed by ATW.

[Chris from Nailsea]

Hi there,

... and, while I'm sorry to see that you have joined us because of your unfortunate mishap, may I also offer you a warm welcome to the Coffee Shop forum, orjennings. 

As others have suggested above, the best idea is for you to keep trying to track down your lost property, at the various lost property offices.  Realistically, the railways have more 'found property' than they can cope with, so it's not reasonable to expect any of them to trace your particular item.

I really hope you get a result, sooner rather than later.