James Fenner

Solved: the mystery of the uncomfortable train seats

Have I won £200 off Matthew Parris?

[iStock]

Readers may recall Matthew Parris’s Spectator article from August last year, ‘Who’s to blame for my terrible journey?’ From 2016 onwards, many rail operating companies, including Thameslink and GWR, began introducing new carriages with ‘ironing board’ seat designs. ‘My buttocks ache at the very recollection,’ Matthew complained. He demanded to know who was responsible and offered £200 to any reader who could produce the relevant names.

In accordance with Matthew’s challenge, I sent a Freedom of Information request to the Department for Transport (DfT). As requests are often denied for being too broad in scope, I focused on Thameslink’s Class 700 carriage seats, asking for the names of the individuals involved in agreeing this particular design. The department’s response was entirely expected:

So I don’t bag the £200. But I did get the names of the organisations involved, along with the reasons the seats turned out the way they did. And the why is almost always more instructive than the who.

Matthew, a proud Europhile, may not be thrilled to discover that the seats were designed to meet European safety standards:

Train interiors need to comply with European Technical Specifications for Interoperability… which are set within legally enforceable standards… The seats on the Class 700 train are therefore similar to seats found on other brand-new commuter trains to meet the European train modern safety standards, particularly for fire and crash worthiness.

Delving deeper, the European Technical Specifications for Interoperability (TSIs) are set out by the European Union Agency for Railways (ERA). The ERA’s mission statement says that it wants to make ‘the railway system work better for society’ and achieve a ‘Single European Railway Area without frontiers’.

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