Low and behold!

A lot has been said about modern seating on carriages, with their relative lack of comfort and view, but no one seems to have mentioned one aspect that I have found, with possible safety consequences.

When boarding with a turn-upand-go ticket, you naturally look around for vacant seats - only to find on reaching them that they are occupied after all, by people seated too low to be seen.

This means casting around for another vacancy. And if you are on a busy train, this will put you in conflict with others going through the same routine. Add baggage and suitcases to the mix, trying to juggle them into the stowage rack, and this will cause delays and may mean that you are a mile down the line before everyone has sorted themselves out.

By comparison, on a luxury road coach designed for sightseeing, you can easily see the heads of all passengers. Now, I know that supposedly these high seats on trains are to avoid whiplash injuries to tall passengers, but it does not seem to be a problem with road coach users who are far more likely (statistically) to have an incident.

Is the stipulation to use high seats justified? I would suggest it does more harm than good in diminishing the pleasure of rail travel, while adding delays to departure and possible risks to standing passengers at boarding time.

I find modern seating less than pleasurable and (in some cases) downright claustrophobic.

Graham Millwood, Bracknell