Great Western Coffee Shop

Question came up in a Facebook group that I'm answering - "We are three and planning travel from Westbury by train with our cycles, but the booking system says there are just two cycle spaces available ..."

Thoughts?

Fairly obviously it is not possible to provide a meaningful answer to this question without knowing the Facebook poster's destination and the time(s) of any  relevant departure(s) from Westbury.  :D

Where are they going from Westbury? Each train company has different policies regarding carriage of bikes. On local services to north and south from there, i.e. Bristol to Weymouth line, bikes don't need to be booked and can be carried (but subject to the guard's discretion), but on the main-line east-west route, booking is I believe required, and may well be limited to two. This is precisely what cyclists like myself have been campaigning about for several decades, that it has become impossible for any group of cyclists to be able to travel together, thus making family outings impossible. And it is still like this, in a climate emergency...

While I'm here, I can also relate the story of what happened when I took a bike from Taunton to Westbury several (maybe 20?) years ago. The bike carriage space then was at the very rear of the train, which was very long (maybe 10 carriages?), and having put it in, I sat down in that rear carriage. As we approached Westbury, I went to retrieve it, and found the door locked between the carriage and the cycle spaces. I got off the train at Westbury, and found the rear of the train was overhanging the rear of the platform, so couldn't be accessed, and the only staff present on the platform were right at the far end of the train. I shouted and waved my arms to get noticed, but that had little effect. Fortunately, a rail employee (I assume he was a driver) walked along to cross the lines and I got his attention, and he managed to alert the train staff to my predicament, and after a few minutes delay, the bike was retrieved. I haven't tried to take a full-size bike on that route since.

That was not specified - so I answered with an "if, then, else" type response.  My thoughts here were thinking as to whether a party of three with cycles can EVER travel on a five car IET running solo, and if they have to travel in separate parts of the train if it's ten cars.

One member of the party needs a folding cycle, which if fully folded and enclosed in a bag becomes "luggage" and not a cycle.

Or depending on timings and destination, they might be able to travel on two different trains, meeting at the destination.

'No' and 'Yes, probably', unless you wish to annoy the TM and all the other passengers by having to walk/jog/run between the two units. So the only foolproof solution would be to travel to a destination / on a service which is guaranteed to be served by a 9 car IET. Best of luck with that!

It's not that simple, even if you take the climate emergency into account. A space for two bikes (parked with both wheels on the floor) is roughly equal to four fixed seats. You can put two or three tip-up seats in the bike space allowing passengers to sit there if there are no bikes to be carried, but a sideways facing thin (thus probably hard) seat with a completely vertical back is massively less comfortable than a high-quality fixed seat (admittedly most new seats fitted to trains these days are not high-quality and perhaps as hard as the tip-ups). Thus, increasing capacity for bikes means decreasing the potential comfortable seating capacity of the train.

10 carriages? Were loco-hauled mark 2s still in use 20 years ago or would it have been an IC125 (eight carriages plus two locomotives/power-cars)?

Since when on railways? Possibly on Southampton JetFoil and some First buses.

C2C do ask for a bag. I don't think it's enforceable though (and have never heard of it being enforced). https://www.c2c-online.co.uk/our-network/advice-for-cyclists/

Eurostar require bagging too: https://www.eurostar.com/uk-en/travel-info/travel-planning/luggage/bikes

Overseas, SBB require folding bikes to be put in a bag, but in my one experience they were happy for that to be a bin bag!