To me it's more a reluctance to explain why the railway does things that are "anti-customer". There are often very good reasons why something is done the way it's done, they just might not be obvious to the average punter. So when queried just being told "it's policy" and/or "we've always done it this way" isn't exactly helpful. Explaining what the reason for the policy is, even though a passenger may prefer that they change the policy, is a far more constructive approach and therefore likely to defuse quite a lot, if not all, the ill-will generated.
Again, not a reasonable expectation of frontline staff to be able to do that in all circumstances at all times (they may not know, they have safety critical duties, or even just time sensitive work to get on with, etc etc). But certainly not unreasonable for customer service staff I'd suggest.
Now, of course, it's perfectly possible that a certain policy really is just down to the convience of the TOC in question and those that drafted it either didn't consider or just didn't care about the impact on customers. But for me the starting point is to actually communicate the reasons for an otherwise seemingly odd policy.
