The Anonymous Widower

Hull Trains Seat Allocation System

When I went to Hull recently, I used Hull Trains.

These pictures show the train as I boarded at London Kings Cross.

When I got my ticket out of the machine, I was very surprised to see the phrase No Specified Seat on the ticket.

I queried it with one of the LNER staff and they said, it will be alright and anyway, it is nothing to do with them.

When I got to the gate, I asked the guy from Hull Trains and he said, you’ll see when you get inside and something like. “Sit in any seat with a green flag!”

You can see the coloured flags on the seats in the pictures. The different colours mean.

• Green – For single travellers
• Red – Do not sit here
• Yellow – For two or more travelling together.

So I choose a window seat with a green flag on it.

Did it work?

• There were no families, but several  pairs of travellers and I suspect about sixty percent of the seats were taken.
• Everybody was socially distanced and either had a spare seat or someone they knew next to them.
• At one table, I could see four guys all sitting together,
• The system deals with no-shows and leaves their seat for someone else.

Until proven otherwise, I think it worked well.

• I didn’t get allocated a seat, but I’m certain the system would work well if say some seats had been allocated by the booking computer.
• Seats could also be indicated by coloured lights.
• But as Hull Trains had only just restarted after the attack of the covids.

I had to have a quiet smile though.

My father was a master at designing production control systems and coloured cards were one of the tools in his box.

Often cards for his big customers like Belling, Dunlop and Enfield Rolling Mills were intricate and numbered creations, all produced with letterpress and his two faithful Original Heidelberg Plattern Presses.

Original Heidelberg

With the right gadgets in the chase, that held the type, they could number, score and perforate. You couldn’t do those operations with litho, in the 1950s and 1960s.

I hadn’t realised much about this side of my father’s work, until I met Ray Askew, whilst walking our basset hound. He had a basset too and on talking,  it turned out he had worked for Enfield Rolling Mills and it was part of his job to source production control documents and he used to design them with my father, whose firm, then printed them!

Could This System Be Used On East Coast Trains?

East Coast Trains are another First Group company like Hull Trains, who will be running services between London and Edinburgh from some time next year.

I can’t see why they could use a developed version of this system, with tri-colour lights on the seats.

East Coast Trains will be aiming for a four hour service and I suspect they’d like people to just turn up and go, so quick ticketing would be needed. A simple app, where you said how many tickets and what train and then you just turned up in time for your train would do.

October 13, 2020 - Posted by AnonW | Design, Health, Transport/Travel | COVID-19, East Coast Trains - Lumo, Hull Trains, My Father, Printing, Ticketing