Bicycle storage on trains déjà vu — why does it have to be so painful? + more on the live blog

[ad_1]

So you want to see a new part of the country, or maybe you’re doing an event which finishes a fair distance from home and don’t want to ride your bike even further, or maybe you need to get somewhere at the other end of your train journey. There are countless scenarios where taking your bike on a train makes sense, and really should not be as difficult as it is…

If you’re lucky your train will be empty and sympathetic staff might just let you keep an eye on it in the carriage. But even then it can be nice, especially on long journeys, to not have to worry about getting up at every station to make sure you aren’t blocking anyone getting on or off. If that’s my ‘ideal option’ then what’s the ‘bad option’? I’m sure this sort of set-up will need no introduction…

Cargo bikers, mountain bikers, bikepackers, and pretty much anyone who doesn’t fit the narrow race bike mould might as well not bother. Oh, what’s that? It can be hard/impossible for many people to do the storage gymnastics required to get a bike up onto the racks? Nah, can’t be, there’s more than enough room for two in there…

road.cc reader Dan got in touch with the following far-too-familiar tale…

“We took the train down from Exeter to Penzance and found this tiny little space for our bikes,” he said. “There is no way we could get both bikes up on the rack. Luckily the guard wasn’t too fussy but what was wrong with the guard’s van in the old days? I think you’d struggle to get two racing bikes in that space let alone a MTB or light cargo bike.”

Of course, this isn’t a new problem. In 2019, London North East Railway said it would work to identify where modifications can be made to the cycle storage on some of its new trains after Cycling UK said that the painfully familiar system now in use was “downright dangerous”.

Editor Jack is one of the hundreds to have had a nightmare bike-transporting train journey. He once made the mistake of trying to get “a very lovely Argon 18 gravel bike with a snazzy Rotor 13-speed groupset to road.cc towers without getting it dirty” via a GWR service to London Paddington.

> Trying to take a very expensive bike on a GWR train is hard work

I’ll let you enjoy the misery in all its glory, but for a taster: “road.cc reviews usually use a star-based system, but I’ve introduced another category especially for the purposes of reviewing GWR’s bike storage (opinions my own, not necessarily representative of my employer). Until next time!”