Advance Tickets and Reserved Seats

[RochdalePioneers]

I'd always thought that if you had an Advance ticket you had to sit in the reserved seat. I recently witnessed a colleague on such a ticket sit where he liked and the NXEC gripper not bat an eyelid.

Is this now standard practice either on NXEC or elsewhere?

 

[mathmo]

Technically you are indeed required to sit in the required seat. However, I've never seen this enforced, and it would be ludicrous if it was (unless you were interfering with someone else's reservation of course). The Virgin TM on a recent service commented that I wasn't in the right place - quite what he wanted me to do I don't know as there were plenty of free seats - but the people in the row in front were also in the wrong place, and he didn't try to move any of us.

 

[221_108]

Some TMs do look puzzled when they check your ticket and see you're not in the seat you reserved, I've only been asked to move once and that was by an XC TM on a rather busy Saturday afternoon.

Some London Midland tickets allow you to sit where you want, instead of printing a seat number in a specificed coach it just has '*' in place so you can chose to sit where you want.