Bikes on trains – let us know your experiences, good and bad

I've had a mixture of experiences. Travelling from Southampton central to Chichester on Southern trains is easy, the carriages are more 'open plan' and it's never been an issue getting the bikes on and off. Travelling from Winchester to Woking, and London Waterloo, with South western railways  is normally okay too. They usually have a couple of carriages with up to 6 dedicated spaces and as long as you're careful about when you travel, there's usually no problems. I've done a cross country train to Birmingham, from Winchester, and from Oxford to Winchester,  and these were on one of the old Virgin 'tilting trains' they have the hanger / cupboard type of arrangement, which was fine on the Oxford journey, but idiots had used them to store their luggage on the Birmingham trip. Fortunately I pre empted the brainless bell ends, and brought a wheeled,  hard, bike case with me. The bike was semi dismantled and packed in the case, and the 'cased' bike, fitted in the luggage holding compartments, that the lazy bastards should have used for their cases, but couldn't be arsed to walk them down the platform / wheel them down the carriage, to the other end of the carriage. I've also used Greater Anglia to get me from London Liverpool Street, to Norwich, and they use the good old fashioned DVT type trains ( used to be known as intercity 225s because the top speeds were 225 Km/h or about 140 mph ). These are great, as they have dedicated 'guard vans' and there's no issues with getting bikes on and off. I've used the new style GWR trains, and I've probably been lucky but I've been with sensible other cyclists, who have helped things by sorting their bikes out so that they fitted nicely.

Travelling mainly off-peak in the UK, but limited to LNER on the east coast, Cross Country and Northern, my experience has generally been good, but I always book in advance. Not tried the new trains on LNER (Azuma) or GWR yet, but the bike ‘cupboards’ don’t look encouraging, especially at a time when the popularity of cycling is growing. Blame the centralised procurement by DfT, and the requirement (?) to increase the number of seats, but how that type of provision saw the light of day needs investigation. Looks like the train operators had no choice, but at least LNER have said that they’ll review the arrangement.

On the East Coast route into Kings Cross, the best bike space that I’ve used is on the electric long distance services, locomotive and 9 coaches (soon to be withdrawn and replaced by the new Azuma) where there is a traditional ‘guards van’ type space with sturdy D hoops, where the bike can be wheeled in and kept horizontal. Plenty of room for around 5 bikes, and panniers if you choose to leave them there.

If you can’t get the train crew attention when you’re standing on the platform, trying to get into a locked area for your bike, open an adjacent passenger vehicle door and wait, this will get you noticed, along with shouting of course!

On local services, the guards/conductors are generally understanding, as long as you’re not standing in an aisle or right in front of a door.

I book at my local station, York, where the booking office staff are very knowledgeable and helpful. Booking a group of say 4 and sometimes needing to travel on separate trains can be a challenge, but stick with it.

Worst .

1. Getting off the Virgin East coast (@Stevenage) at 11pm and nobody to open up the baggage carriage door and the platform guard whilstling the train to leave so bike on its way to Kings Cross, me screaming at the clearly deaf/ignorant person from 75yards away "get my effing bike, off the effing train" after three previous attempts to grab their attention failed.

2. Doncaster platform, train an hour late so already 10:30, Donny is cold even during the summer but it was flipping freezing. No-one from Virgin on platform indicating which end for the bikes, get told it's the other end as its pulled in so a sprint down the platform shouting at people to get out the way. Virgin women from 1st class with her bloody airline steward type hat telling me to hurry up getting my bike in the carriage, I said "excuse me, it's you who were an hour late and I'm making my bike secure, you'll wait until I've finished sorting that". I sat in first class as a protest as I was bloody annoyed and cold and it was minus something by time I started the 5 mile ride back from the end station which topped it all off.

3. Being told (at Hull Paragon) that I couldn't put my bike into the virtually empty storage lockers of a national express type coach that was put on as the bridge over the river was damaged and the track wasn't meeting up. Standing arguing about how I've a contract to get me to my destination (Doncaster) and that there's a ton of space to put my bike in. Refused again so said I was getting a taxi to get my connection and they'd get the bill which would be £30 and I was going to call the police for obstructing me from boarding a public transport vehicle, the driver of the coach was fine, it was the a-hole railway jobsworth!

4. Booking train journeys, it was fine until a few years ago, you could book a space with your ticket, nice and easy, then the feature was removed from the website (Virgin/east coast) and not put on the new Beta site either.

So, you have to book your ticket not knowing if there's a space for your bike, I did ring Virgin CS once, it was based in India, call tok 40 minutes, never again i thought! Have been going to local train station, no-one knows how to book a bike reservation except that one person who not on the booths, so you have to wait for the one person who does, website crashes repeatedly so you're there 15 minutes and more with people huffing behind you. Too often comes up with no spaces at all despite you knowing that in the last XX years there's ALWAYS been spaces available cos it's a midweek, mid morning train going away from London, and sure enough when you eventually ring East Coast or cycle the 5 miles to the nearest East Coast office (there's no direct tel.line to that office) there's spaces. Except on day of travel cos someone hasn't done their job the overhead lines get ripped off by a train, trains are cancelled the following morning, the train is rammed, guard is angsty cos the baggage cariage is 'full' despite actually being more than half empty and I can put the bike against some other very solid object so the bike won't move barring a crash, oh yeah and sitting on the floor only room cos the train manager is too precious about 1st class!

Good things. Sheffield to Brid train on Northern line earlier this year. Got a normal comfortable seat right (as opposed to a fold.flip down) right next to my bike on the carriage, big gap to roll bike through into the compartment, Just perfect, but a complete one off in 20 years of bike by train.

off peak 'crossrail' trains (to Brighton I think they terminate) are okay, you can pretty much put your bike where you like in the vestibules (even 1st class) without much agg because the trains are maybe a quarter to half full.

here's my best part of a bike with train bit ever, all too short and a one off.

With a normal bike in the UK, not so bad. Been on the transpennine expressquite a few times now from Manchester to Hull, booked bike on, a label was tied to where I had to put the bike, worked fine. On one occassion a guy was sat right in the middle of the fold down seats and removed to move a couple of seats across to let me get my bike in but I just walked down the train to the next carriage. Bike space shouldn't conflict with person space.

Tandem. Different matter. It takes up less space than two normal bikes but Northern Rail have refused to let me take it a couple of times, even pre-booked. But they are a useless train service.

Now lets transport ourselves to a completely different universe (Holland). Pure bliss! My wife broke on the last day of our trip on the tandem so we got the train back to Rotterdam. Two train journeys. Every thing was amazing. Bike lifts to every platform, tons of bike space on the train, conductors were so helpful, no-one had a problem with us doing it. Absolute amazing. Naturally, we wheeled the bike out of the station straight onto a dedicated bike lane from the center of Rotterdam which took us all the way back to the ferry.