One piece of railway marketing not thought through is from the clever people who have ordered the smart, new £1billion Bombardier Class 345 trains knowing that they have no toilets.

Apparently, according to the caring management at Transport for London toilets take up valuable seat space that could be sold and they are planning to run the loo-less trains on the 60-mile, 102 minute stretch between Reading and Shenfield. They say that the average time passengers will be without a loo is 20-minutes but this doesn’t allow for breakdowns and signal failures.

So why not just admit “We’ve screwed up”?