First Capital Connect, Stevenage to Cambridge.
4 car train with no racks / seat-free space for a bike. Restricted vestibule width that can't accommodate a full-size bike without it being wedged in at a funny angle and protruding into aisle. Lashed myself up a parking-brake as above so I could sit down near the bike, jumping up now and again to move sides from platform being on left or right of train.
1/10 only for there being no staff on the train to give a t*ss about me probably being in breach of some sort of elves and safety regulations
CrossCountry, Cambridge to Peterborough
3-car Turbostar (you'll be familiar with these if you do the Edinburgh to Glasgow or Aberdeen run) masquerading as a semi-express train on between London and Birmingham (via Peterborough).
Signs on platform and display board were for "reserved bikes only" and as I had a reservation for both bike and seat I was pretty optimistic. When the train arrived, somehow 3 other studenty-looking types appeared with bikes, 1 of whom disappeared into the vestibule at far end of train, the other 2 managed to get on ahead of me at the door with the bike sticker in it. The "bike space", had no rack, although the fittings were there for it, it had been removed and just the vertical portion remained. In its place was a pushchair.
I don't know if there's normally a larger train, but it was rammed full of huge bits of luggage everywhere, including 3/4 of the floor space in the vestibule.
I ended up standing in the vestibule with my bike at a jaunty angle , blatantly blocking the aisle. When the guard came along, she scolded the other cyclists for not having reservations, pointing out they were free to make and there wasn't room for the bikes, but didn't turf them off. She quoted "health and safety" legislation at the others, which was rather jobsworth of her considering how happy she was to (literally) climb over the luggage blocking aisle and vestibule and that the First Capital Connect service was happy to take as many bikes as you could cram into the vestibules, without officially taking any!
Nobody had the heart (or could be bothered) to turf the not-disabled people out of the disabled space, where the pram could have been, so we could have at least stacked the bikes in the empty floor space that was meant to be - on paper - for bikes
-2/10 for creating pointless regulations that they aren't willing to enforce and claiming to provide a bike space that didn't infact exist.
East Coast, Edinburgh - Stevenage / Peterborough - Edinburgh (Glasgow Train)
As always, East Coast were pretty good (so long as you've booked and aren't taking a non-regulation bike along). Platform staff are nearly always super-efficient at approaching anyone looking like they might have a bike with them to check if they've reserved (I've been asked for my reservations at least twice when I'm only meeting someone off the train, but happen to be in my cycling togs) which is useful as the HST trains and the Mark IV trains are both very long and have bike compartments at the complete opposite ends from eachother, so you need to know which end of the platform to be at and it isn't always predicable.*
This was also my first experience of putting the bike on and taking it off at intermediate stops. Getting on at Peterborough, the guard even lashed the thing onto the rack for me so I could begin the long walk from the luggage van to the quiet coach, across 300-odd metres of body and luggage-strewn overcrowded train.
On both occasions I took precaution of walking the length of the train to get off at the door nearest the luggage van when it was my stop - nobody ever tells you to do that when you put your bike on, although both guards were ready and waiting at the relevant station to let me get in and get the bike off.
7/10 - points off for making booking a reservation on the website much more complicated and stressful than it needs be.
* - I've never seen quite so much chaos at a train station as when the East Coast train from London to Aberdeen pulled in to Waverley back to front (it had done what should be impossible for a train and managed a U-turn near Doncaster due to fault windscreen wiper at the driving end). This caused an omni-directional stampede as those waiting for first-class and to put bikes on tried to get to one end of the platform and those waiting for Stella Artois-class tried to simultaneously do the opposite on one of the narrowed-by-renovation platforms.
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