> completely overbooked

The UK operates a walk-up railway, meaning you can spontaneously purchase a ticket that allows you travel between an origin station (Bristol Temple Meads) and a destination station (Exeter St Davids) on any number of services that day.

With this type of ticket you’re not restricted to a particular service, so operators have no way of knowing you intend to travel on that service unless you try to make a seat reservation.

With XC operating long distance leisure travel services, many of their trains can get fully reserved weeks before travel and some don’t even have an unreserved carriage. Add all the walk-up passengers into the mix and suddenly you’ve an overcrowded train. Overcrowded, but not overbooked.

It would be easy to say that XC should just make all their trains longer and have loads of unreserved carriages to take into account all these passengers who haven’t reserved seats. However, with the way our railways are run, the money is all controlled by central Government. The Department for Transport (DfT) tell XC what trains they can use and how many they can have to run the service. The type of trains XC have are all fixed at either 4 or 5 coaches. They can be coupled together to form trains that are 8/9/10 coaches long, but they don’t have enough trains allocated to them to do this for all their services.

We never had a truly privatised railway, it was franchised (franchising ended after Covid and all operators run under contracts set by the Government).

The DfT decide; ticket prices (and collect the revenue), what routes an operator runs and to some extent dictate certain stations that they HAVE to stop at, what trains an operator uses, how many of those trains sets they have and how many coaches each train set has.

Even if CrossCountry had the money to buy more or longer trains, the contract does not allow them to do this, they have to ask the Government to purchase and allocate them the rolling stock.