Guardian: Taking your bike by train in the UK needs a combination of luck, patience and an encyclopaedic knowledge of the rail industry. Why is it so hard to take a bike on a train when the usual alternative would be driving all the way? I went away for the weekend recently, starting with a train from Guildford to Reading. The trains on this line sometimes have space for one bike, sometimes nothing. I had to guess where the bike space would be and then pray that it wasn’t already be stuffed …