There are many rental shops in Newquay. More ameteur surfers certainly use them. Keener surfers often have have boards worth thousands of pounds specially customised for themselves, when they are particularly keen surfers, just like people do in other sports. I suspect that a surprisingly small percentage of them won them on bullseye.If Newquay's tourism is so dependent on surfers then there's enough of them to support rental of different types and sizes. They could even reserve them in advance, nobody is getting on a train with a surfboard on a whim. Or are they? Who are all these people who live in London and own surfboards? Why? Did they win them on Bullseye?
It normally annoys me when people talk about customising a train for a very specific flow, but I think this is a missed one - a loss of say 8 seats (or half the galley) wouldn't be a massive deal considering how much bigger they are than HSTs, and would have been useful not just for surfboards, but also bikes, luggage etc. There is a lot of holiday traffic on this line, and the huge posters up in Reading (I assume also in Paddington) saying not to bring a surfboard do rather jar against the '5 go to the seaside' advertising
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