We travelled down to Birmingham for a short citybreak just before Easter. We booked on Avanti West Coast Haymarket to New Street and return, and all went pretty well. We were 14 minutes late into HYM on the way home but otherwise there were no real problems with the service.
I had carefully selected forward-facing seats for both journeys, and this was confirmed in the booking e-mail from AWC. However, on boarding the train to Birmingham, we discovered that our reserved seats (13 and 14 in coach F) were in fact backward-facing. Although normally I don't mind backward-facing seats, on a Pendolino I find that combined with the tilting it can give me a bit of a headache. Overall, though, it wasn't a major issue.
I am puzzled, though, as to why AWC don't seem to know which way round their coaches are arranged. The train definitely arrived first class leading into HYM which I believe is the normal way round, so I don't think it had been turned. Thinking about it, our sets were in the rearward half of the coach, when I might have expected them to be numbered from the leading end, which does make me think maybe the coach had been removed/replaced and put back in the set the wrong way round.
So I'm still wondering what might have caused this: does AWC simply not know which way round their coaches are, had the set been shuffled, or could there be another explanation?
I had carefully selected forward-facing seats for both journeys, and this was confirmed in the booking e-mail from AWC. However, on boarding the train to Birmingham, we discovered that our reserved seats (13 and 14 in coach F) were in fact backward-facing. Although normally I don't mind backward-facing seats, on a Pendolino I find that combined with the tilting it can give me a bit of a headache. Overall, though, it wasn't a major issue.
I am puzzled, though, as to why AWC don't seem to know which way round their coaches are arranged. The train definitely arrived first class leading into HYM which I believe is the normal way round, so I don't think it had been turned. Thinking about it, our sets were in the rearward half of the coach, when I might have expected them to be numbered from the leading end, which does make me think maybe the coach had been removed/replaced and put back in the set the wrong way round.
So I'm still wondering what might have caused this: does AWC simply not know which way round their coaches are, had the set been shuffled, or could there be another explanation?