Being on a Virgin train with my iPad, recently, reminded me of when I left my previous iPad behind on the train when I got off at Preston. The train was still on its way to its final destination of Glasgow when I realised what I had done, So I rang Virgin, thinking that they would tell one of the train crew to get it from the seat I had been in and perhaps a Virgin train would drop it off at Preston station the next day. Because that’s what would happen with normal human interaction, isn’t it? If you’d, say, left something at someone’s house, they would locate it for you and work out with you how you get back.

But that’s not what Virgin Trains do.

Virgin Trains advised me to phone the lost property office at Glasgow. They didn’t explain why and I didn’t ask because it seemed obvious. I could imagine that they don’t retrieve items on travelling trains because they are not set up or resourced to do that. But, I reasoned, they know that the train would be cleared of anything left behind and that would be taken to lost property. They would be able to pop my iPad on a train back to Preston.

Unfortunately, Glasgow were not able to help me (I think I had to call back the following morning) and advised me to call Virgin’s lost property line. But this is where I started to feel frustrated. I had called Virgin when it would have been easy to retrieve my iPad as I knew exactly where it was. Now my iPad could be anywhere. And it could have been stolen: to my mind avoidable if someone had just gone to get it – the train was exceptionally quiet and I very much doubt that anyone would have sat in the seat I had been in.

As I’ve made my point, I’ll spare you too much the detail of my further frustrations – of being advised to call Kings Cross lost property and of the lady with the contracted (?) Virgin lost property service who gave me a reference number and said that she would have to ring offices up and down the line. What, no shared database of lost property even for one line? No doubt this is all an overhead for Virgin, but losing property is all part of the customer experience and you’d think Virgin would want this to be good. They may know that I have little or no choice but to use them for some train journeys. But I do have a choice between, say, Virgin Atlantic and their competitors.

Oh, and I didn’t get my iPad back or even hear back from Virgin’s lost property service.