Insulted and assaulted by a Virgin bureaucrat

The provocation, I admit, was pretty serious: I'd asked, politely, if I might board the 9.45pm from New Street to Euston with a bicycle. Each of the trains used on this route has two sizeable bike parking areas for precisely this purpose. Strictly speaking, you need a reservation to use them, although this is almost never insisted on if space is available, as it was last night and indeed almost always is.

I explained, again politely, that it is possible to get bike reservations only at Virgin ticket offices (the website does not offer them); that I had started my journey yesterday evening from a place without a Virgin ticket office, or any other. I explained that the connection did not allow enough time to get a bike reservation at Birmingham; that for my particular journey it was, in fact, impossible to go through the bureaucratic hoops Virgin required; and that this was also the last train of the night. I even offered to take the bike's wheels off. It made no difference: after the barrage of four-letter words, I ended up getting pushed on to the platform.

Now I've been kicked off half empty trains before for the crime of bringing a bike - but never in such circumstances, and never in such a fashion. You feel, I can report, not so much angry, more amazed: even by Virgin standards, this was stonecarved, historic, off-the-scale bad.

Yet this isn't just a personal complaint. What happened last night is a tiny example of the more general reasons why the railways in this country are broken and will never fulfil their potential.

First: they complicate things that should be simple. The bike rules are but a microcosm of a network so burdened by regulation and bureaucracy and having to agree everything with 456 different bodies that much-needed improvement has become almost impossible.

Second: they are run, at all levels, by incompetent authoritarians, of whom my train guard was an extreme specimen. Arguing with me delayed the train. Showing flexibility would have been by far the easier option - for both of us - and would have cost him nothing, except the pleasure of flexing his muscles.

Third: privatisation has turned a civilised means of travel into one that only Max Mosley could appreciate. It has erased the residual public-service culture inherited from BR, without replacing it with a customer-service culture. It's impossible even to imagine an employee of, say, M&S behaving like that railwayman did to a customer with a legitimate, easily solved problem.

Fourth: after our contretemps, I and the bike came home from Birmingham by taxi. To my amazement, I found that the chauffeur-driven trip cost me not much more than a standard ticket on Virgin Trains.