It certainly wasn’t ram-packed. Boarding Wednesday morning’s 11am train to Newcastle from Kings Cross, the same journey undertaken by Jeremy Corbyn on 11 August, anybody could have had their pick of seats.
Asking passengers on the train what they felt about Jeremy Corbyn and Traingate, Dave, a Labour supporter, said he had “strong views” and described the floor-sitting video statement as “opportunistic”. He felt that with all the money pouring into the Labour party, it was incompetent not to have reserved seats in advance.
Susan, travelling from London to Newcastle to visit her sister, had absolutely no time for Corbyn’s argument. “I’ve travelled on this line for 25 years,” she said. “I’ve never once not got a seat.”
Asked about Corbyn’s policy of nationalisation of the railways, she had a different priority. The railways should be owned by British people, not foreigners, she said. All our industry now is owned by foreigners, she asserted. And she has a point – under privatisation state-owned rail operators from the continent are able to buy up and operate rail franchises in the UK in a way that, since the break-up of British Rail, we can’t do.
By contrast, I spoke to Adam Pacitti in Coach B, who was fully in favour of nationalisation. A Labour supporter, who said he liked Corbyn, was concerned that press coverage had drummed home the idea that Corbyn was unelectable. The railway issue was a classic example of this. He said that on more than one occasion he had been forced to sit on the floor on a journey between London and Newcastle because the train has been overcrowded. He uses the route fortnightly, and had plenty of horror stories about broken heating or air-conditioning causing discomfort on the journeys.
Another passenger, Sef Townsend, was fully in favour of nationalisation. “There seems to be a dogma that privatised services work better. Well, they work better for shareholders.” He’d had to trek down the aisles in the train because a couple of the toilets were out of action.
Mentish, yet another passenger, was on Coach C of the 11:00 from Kings Cross, travelling for business. He didn’t do it too often, he said. He wasn’t in favour of nationalisation, but he would like to see more central control and accountability so that train operating companies were responsible for “the promises they’ve made”.
The Virgin Trains staff were understandably reluctant to go on the record after Richard Branson had publicly involved himself in a row with the Labour leader over train over-crowding, but speaking to them it was obvious who they thought was more likely to be painting a truer picture of the 11am service.
On a sample walk-through of the 78 seat carriage E in standard class, a few minutes after departure, there were 19 unoccupied seats with tickets indicating reservations on them, 6 completely empty seats, and 5 seats where you could conceivably ask someone to move their bag and budge up a bit.
When I get my ticket inspected I tried to engage the ticket inspector in conversation without mentioning that I’m a journalist. “Plenty of spare seats today … ” I said. “Aye, even enough for Mr Corbyn” came the reply.
Another member of the train crew said: “You’ve seen what this train is like. It’s like this every day.”
Linda, heading up to Newcastle with her two sons, seemed to strike the tone that most people I spoke to expressed. Her customer experience of the railway franchise system was frustrating for her. She said it was difficult to buy tickets to make long journeys across the country and frustrating that different rail companies have different rules about tickets. “But I wouldn’t go back to British Rail,” she said.
