Home of Slightly Cracked Dreams

A while ago, Snos at Life in the Country challenged us to compliment good service we'd recieved. It's taken me a while, and even longer since I recieved great service, but I feel strongly in this case, and in many ways these people made our holiday much more plesant.

Imagine if you will, an exhausted couple, fresh off the plane from Australia, struggling with 4 suitcases, 4 backpacks, a laptop bag, a stroller, a 3 year old and a 2 year old through Reading train station. Running to catch a train. The last train for 3 hours that could take us where we wanted to go. Have you ever spent 3 hours at a train station with a 3 year old and 2 year old? Me either. And I don't want to.

We made the train. Except we ended up in the first class carriage. The train-manager (lovely lady) waited until the train was under way, enlisted the help of 3 (that's three) other staff members to carry our luggage until she found 4 seats together, unbooked for the rest of the journey. She stowed all our luggage, checked our tickets and where we were going, and left us to it.

A quick walk identified a shop on board, which not only sold food, but had FREE toy packages for the kids. They included: a train passport for you to fill in on each journey, a book (about 40 pages), a colouring book, crayons, a Fifi DVD (about 10 minutes) and some playing cards.

As we neared the station at which we were told initially to change trains at, the train manager came back to us and told us she was getting off at the next stop. She then suggested we go on to the next station and change trains there, as there were only 4 platforms, as opposed to 20 odd. We thought that sounded good to us.

As we pulled out of the big station, the new train manager came and introduced himself, and got our luggage together in plenty of time for us to get off easily. He even helped. Once off the train we began struggling towards the lifts when angels came in the form of two staff, who delt with luggage while we child wrangled to the other platform, just in time to make the train, which was a different company (they do things funny in the UK) and the service was much less noteworthy. We got off at our station without so much as uttering a word to anyone.

We had a similar experience on our return journey, which was completed in two parts. Except this time, not only did we have assistance on the platform, we had staff radioing ahead to our destinaton station and people MET US off the train and carried our luggage to a cab.

I have never, EVER experienced such service. In case you haven't guessed yet the company was Virgin, and while I do have friends who work for Virgin in this country, I have never been so impressed with ANY staff in my life. Any staff member I delt with from Virgin Trains is a true credit to themselves and their company.

A copy of this post has been forwarded to Virgin Trains, along with the dates and times of our journeys.